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

[Chris Murphy]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 6:28 PM, jd1008 <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 03/17/2015 06:19 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>
>> dd if=/dev/sdX count=1 2>/dev/null | hexdump -C
>
> # dd if=/dev/sdb bs=440 count=1   2>/dev/null | hexdump -C
> 00000000  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
> |................|
> *
> 000001b0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00                           |........|
> 000001b8

No bootloader code.

>
>
> # dd if=/dev/sdb bs=4b count=1 2>/dev/null | hexdump -C
> 00000000  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
> |................|
> *
> 000001b0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  3b 00 c5 1b 00 00 00 00
> |........;.......|
> 000001c0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
> |................|
> 000001d0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 20  |...............
> |
> 000001e0  21 00 83 fe ff ff 00 08  00 00 af 80 e0 e7 00 fe
> |!...............|
> 000001f0  ff ff 82 fe ff ff 1e 18  e1 e7 91 70 ff 00 55 aa
> |...........p..U.|
> 00000200  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

It has no partition 1 or 2 entry, they're in 3 and 4.

So kinda interesting, I guess either the firmware gets confused due to
lack of a 1st partition, or it just has no fallback mechanism when the
first drive it finds has no bootloader code.



-- 
Chris Murphy