View Single Post
  #5   (View Single Post)  
Old 25th July 2013
moosejaw moosejaw is offline
Port Guard
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Milwaukee
Posts: 12
Default

The "external drive boots first" isn't a platform policy, it's just been my preferred BIOS setting, since I occasionally boot from a thumbdrive (to test other OSes, etc) and this lets me do that without hitting F12 and manually selecting the boot device. (i.e., I've set things up this way primarily out of laziness)

I did succeed in zeroing the external drive's first sector with dd, writing a new disklabel onto the disk, switching the BIOS boot order back to "USB drive before internal HD", and booting successfully from the internal HD.

I appreciate your thoughts on maintaining an MBR on the disk as a precaution. Perhaps I will fdisk/disklabel the external drive once more and set the BIOS to boot preferentially from the internal drive. I suppose I can manage to hit F12 for the occasional boot from USB, especially if this might keep me from accidentally damaging the external drive's contents if I plug it in somewhere else.

Thanks; this has been very helpful for learning more about fdisk and disklabel.
Reply With Quote