Goflex Home won't boot with external USB drive plugged in.

[Snerler]

I wanted to add more storage to my GoFlex home which is booting from SATA port.

I formatted a 3TB external hard drive as ext3 with Gparted on another computer and plugged it into the USB port. The external USB drive gets recognized because after executing "blkid -o list -c /dev/null," the hard drive shows up in the list as:

/dev/sdb1 ext3 (not mounted)

But if I reboot, the Goflex does not come back over ssh until i remove the USB drive and restart again. I set my rootfs partition to have the boot flag and made sure the partition on USB does not have the boot flag but that didnt help.

Does the USB port have booting priority over the SATA port, or what is the reason I can't boot with USB drive plugged in?

[WarheadsSE]

By what you say, it seems reasonable that the USB has priority.

[Snerler]

How can I change the booting priority back to the SATA port?

[Snerler]

So I tried booting with a different 500 GB external hard drive and it booted ok. So I think there is something different about my 3TB hard drive. Is it because it contains a partition of >2 TB, with MBR?

One thing I noticed is that when I run "blkid -o list -c /dev/null" with other USB drives plugged in the UUID is something short like:
"6494BFE994BFBC3C"
but with the 3TB drive the UUID gets the same long format as my boot partition like:
"8a976a06-3e56-476f-b73a-ea3cad41d915"

[WarheadsSE]

Yeah, the 3TB is probably a GPT and might be throwing it off.

[moonman]

This thread should help you to boot off of 3TB viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2611&start=30

[Snerler]

I'm not sure that thread applies to my situation. I don't want to boot from the 3TB external hard drive, I just can't turn on my system with the 3TB drive plugged into the USB port. I want to continue booting from my SATA drive.

[moonman]

Sorry my mistake, I thought your 3TB was the sata drive. Maybe if you make that drive a Hybrid MBR it will boot? It's something to try.

[Snerler]

Thanks I'm gonna try the hybrid MBR next.

[Snerler]

Another thing I was wondering about is if its possible to change the Uboot parameters to prevent booting from USB, or to put the USB port after the SATA port.