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

[jd1008]

On 03/17/2015 06:45 PM, Rick Stevens wrote:
> On 03/17/2015 04:23 PM, jd1008 wrote:
>> On this old dell (dual pentium), connecting the external
>> drive (a seagate 2TB external 2.5" "backup plus" drive.
>>
>> When I got the drive, I connected it after booting into fedora.
>>
>> Partition 1 contained some windows related stuff for backup.
>> I backed it up to another drive.
>>
>> I partitioned the drive to two partitions only.
>> Partition 1 is the entire drive - minus 8GB).
>> Partition 2 is 8GB swap partition.
>> I formatted partition 2 ext4.
>>
>> So far, so good.
>>
>> Now, if I power up with this external drive connected (usb3),
>> all I get is a cursor at upper left corner.
>>
>> If I disconnect the drive, reboot, then I get the Fedora boot menu,
>> almost instantly.
>> Before I select which kernel to boot, I connect this external drive
>> and boot the latest kernel.
>>
>> All is well.
>>
>> So, what has remained on the external drive to cause bios
>> to hang like that?
>
> It's pretty common for the BIOS to, by default, try to boot external
> media (CD ROM, USB, eSATA and such) BEFORE booting a local hard disk.
> This is how you can boot a rescue CD or install software without
> disconnecting your internal hard drive first.
>
> If you ABSOLUTELY must have the drive attached at boot time, get into
> the BIOS and change the boot order so the internal drive is tried BEFORE
> your USB stuff. Remember, however, that if you do this, then you won't
> be able to boot any external media unless you flip the BIOS back.
>
> Thou hast been warned!
Right.
Did just that. I had a mistaken assumption as to what I had set the boot 
order to.
It has been corrected.