[ale] Can no longer boot one of my drives - SOLVED

[Robert Reese]

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
On 12/20/2007 at 10:10 PM James P. Kinney III wrote:

>You said it better. I was mixing my boot parts. Correct - BIOS has
>renumbered things and grub sees the BIOS setup and now chokes. The
>kernel is _NOT_ involved yet. 
>
>This should only happen with a BIOS new enough to support booting from a
>usb port device.

Exactly.  The OS has *nothing* to do with it.  It is purely hardware ala bios (mobo).  It's a particular problem now with the ubiquitousness of usb drives, and you'd probably be surprised where they're showing up.  For example, my wife and I purchased some inexpensive photo cubes to give to grandparents and such, and I discovered they look like itty-bitty drives to the machine.

You would _not_ be surprised at the number of support calls I get about a machine not booting up and finding they had something plugged into a USB port that created the problem; even these fancy printers with the memory card slots built in can cause problems.  One of the first steps I take is now to have them unplug all USB items except for the keyboard and mouse, with the caveat of knowing which plug went into which port (for Windows, obviously).

Cheers,
Robert~

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