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At times when I boot my computer, my external hard drives will indicate disk activity before Grub loads. At this stage when the external drives blink, there is a blinking underscore displayed on the monitor so I'm guessing GRUB does this. The process can be quite slow as I have an external hard drive that spins down after no hard disk activity.

If this process is mandatory in order to identify bootable devices, is there a way to blacklist my external hard disk? Perhaps my external hard drive accidently has bootloader code and is prompted grub to further identify any potential operating systems?

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    I'm not 100% certain, but I'm going to guess the drive activity you're seeing is actually happening before the bootloader even runs . . . grub doesn't scan devices, it just shows what's in it's conf file
    – ernie
    May 6, 2013 at 3:10
  • Ernie has a point... The BIOS attempts to look for devices before the bootloader even starts.
    – Robert Harvey
    May 6, 2013 at 3:11
  • Oh man, I'm so stupid. Should this question even be deleted?
    – chaz
    May 6, 2013 at 3:22

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The easiest thing to do would be changing the boot order in BIOS. Change the boot order to:
- Internal drive
- External drive (USB)
- etc
If your internal drive is the first one to boot and you still have this problem, you will know the external drive is not creating this problem.

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  • Thanks, I cannot believe I did not consider that. That solves my problem, thanks!
    – chaz
    May 6, 2013 at 3:21
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    A small tip for future readers - there are some strange BIOSes that allow the boot order menu to be overridden with a separate option like "always boot from USB devices first". Just something to keep in mind if you end up with a BIOS like that.
    – Karan
    May 7, 2013 at 16:02

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