Re: grub2 hangs / freezes when external USB hard drive is connected

[shawn wilson <ag4ve.us@gmail.com>]

it seems i read too fast. i still think the bios is your issue, but to uninstall grub on that hdd, do this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<device> bs=446 count=1

if i'm right, instead of seeing welcome to grub, you'll just see a blinking cursor after doing this (i think).

On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 1:38 AM, shawn wilson <ag4ve.us@gmail.com> wrote:

are you sure you don't have grub installed on that usb hdd?

either way, if you're not going to be booting off of usb devices on a regular basis, go into the bios and put usb lower in the boot order. i've seen things like usb mice and hubs mess with usb at boot time (not kidding).

On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 1:04 AM, Peter Tenenbaum <peter.g.tenenbaum@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone --

My squeeze home machine cannot boot when an external hard drive is connected via USB.  When the drive is disconnected, booting occurs normally; but when it is connected, I get a "Welcome to Grub!" message and then nothing further happens.

I've tried going into the boot menu in BIOS and setting the boot order so that the external hard drive is used last, but I still have this problem.  It seems like it must be at least partially successful in booting off the internal hard drives, since they have grub2 installed but the external hard drive does not.

Any suggestions for how I can configure the system so that it does not get into trouble when the external hard drive is connected?

Thanks in advance,
-PT