Boot with external HDD's

[asterios_polyp]

I received such helpful advice the other day, I am back with another question!

I have multiple external hdd's mounted to my system. They work just fine when the system is on. When I restart the machine though, it gets stuck on the opening Dell screen. If I unplug the hdd's and restart, it boots up no problem. I am guessing the system is getting confused as to which drive to boot from. Is this another issue that might be resolved by updating my kernal? Is there a way to see and edit which disk the system is booting from?

Thanks!

Running Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon.

 

[arochester]

How are the External disks connected? If by USB does your BIOS/Boot Order specify USB first? Or does it say HDD first?

 

[Vrai]

I am guessing the system is getting confused as to which drive to boot from.

Usually the BIOS would determine the order in which devices are checked for a bootable OS.
If there is no bootable OS on that device the BIOS will skip it and proceed to the next.
You may be able to set the internal HDD as the first boot device. The downside to doing that is if you later want to boot from a USB or DVD drive you would have to go back in and rearrange the boot order.

It sounds like the computer is checking for boot devices and stopping on one of the external drives because it thinks there is a bootable OS there.

 

[asterios_polyp]

They are connected via USB. In the Boot order, USB was not selected as an option for it to boot from. But under system config, USB config, the "Enable Boot Support" was checked - I unchecked that, and now it works!