Unexpected bios behavior??? due to connection of an external drive.

[Chris Murphy]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 5:23 PM, jd1008 <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Partition 2 is 8GB swap partition.
> I formatted partition 2 ext4.

I'm confused because this seems like partition 2 is swap and ext4.


> Now, if I power up with this external drive connected (usb3),
> all I get is a cursor at upper left corner.

What tool did you use to partition this drive?

parted writes bootloader code to LBA 0 instructing the CPU to read the
first absolute sector defined by the MBR partition entry having an
active bit set. If there's nothing there, it stalls.

The solution is to go to firmware setup and define a different drive
as primary. Or zero the first 440 bytes of the external drive e.g. dd
if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=440 count=1



-- 
Chris Murphy