External USB drive takes boot precedence...

[blakey2]

Hi,

I've just installed Debian Etch 4.0 r5.
Grub bootloader.

Works a treat.

I want to plug in my external USB drive to enable additional storage.

When the system is already booted, I plug it in, it automounts, works perfectly.
I reboot the system and GRUB hangs with an error msg:

Unable to mount root
fs on unknown-block(0,0)

I've changed the boot order in the BIOS to disable removable devices from booting at all.

I *Believe* that the issue is that the USB is being emulted as SCSI and mounting as sda1, which is what the SCSI (internal mirrored raid array) would normally mount as if there was no USB drive attached.

*I hope this makes sense*

Anyone know how to change grub so that it will always boot from the internal HDD..
.. or can I change the mountpoints to always mount the internal HDD as SDB1 or something and change the GRUB config accordongly...

I found these links with the same problem (more or less) but o resolution:

http://www.debianhelp.org/node/3943

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-648170.html

Cheers!

 

[RhythmAce]

I'm not quite sure the answer is in the grub configs but you can find them in /boot/grub/grub.conf. You might want to look at /etc/fstab to see if it is listed there. If it is, it is set to automount. I'm thinking that is what you want to change.

 

[geirendre]

Since it fails when Grub tries to boot from it, I think your right in
suspecting the BIOS-drive enumeration or something similar to be the problem.
I know that on my MSI Diamond motherboard with AMI-bios this happends.
If I insert a USB-pendrive and try to boot with "default" bios-settings,
it will fail to boot.
If I then go into the BIOS to check the boot-order there, the 1.bootdevice
have changed from my harddrive to being the USB-pendrive.
Changing the boot-order so to remove the USB-pendrive from it solved it for me.
I can now boot my machine with (or without) the pendrive not making any difference.