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Old 25th July 2013
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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I don't know why your platform seems to have an "external drive boots first" policy, nor why you cannot control this via BIOS settings. If you are able to control it, that, to me, would be your easiest solution.

There is no reason why you should not maintain an MBR sector at the front of your drive -- an MBR should be considered a risk mitigation. If you have an MBR, you may prevent another OS from inadvertently scribbling on the drive, should you accidentally connect the drive to one of those OSes.

Every fdisk-like program will write MBR bootcode into Sector 0 whenever an MBR is written for the first time, or reinitialized. All the fdisk-like programs I know of, including the one that came with MS-DOS, can update the bootcode in an existing MBR upon request.

If you really want to eliminate the MBR from your external drive, you could do so. However, if your BIOS insists on attempting to boot from the drive, if it does not find a valid MBR the BIOS may provide its own "No O/S" message and stop. In that case, all you will have done is waste your time backing up filesystems, zeroing out Sector 0, recreating a disklabel, reformatting filesystems, and restoring data.

Last edited by jggimi; 25th July 2013 at 04:50 PM. Reason: typo, clarity
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