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I have an "old" R620 that in a previous life was used as a ESX host. The machine has a 1GB SD card with which had the VMware software on it. I have installed ubuntu on the HD.

No matter what I do the machine always defaults to booting from SD card.

The problem is that The boot order just has HD C: which does not have separate entries for the SD and the HD. It always boots from the SD unless one explicitly tells it to boot from the HD in the "BIOS boot " (F 11 ) where you get two options when you select "C:".

I have formatted the SD so it nolonger boots ESX, instead it now complains that there are no bootable system.

During the Ubuntu install I made sure that the SD was not set as a boot device and that the SD was.

The only other thing I can think of is to get data center staff to remove the SD card.

Any other suggestions?

2 Answers 2

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(Legally required notice - I work for Dell)

What's nice about this problem is that there is only one possible problem and that is that it is the boot order. Things that can alter the boot order:

  1. BIOS/UEFI settings
  2. Boot loader
  3. Boot manager (ex: Grub)

From your description it's not #3. If you're seeing "HD C:" overwhelming odds are BIOS/UEFI is displaying that. I would go check the boot order in the iDRAC. I have seen this behavior when people accidentally mix and match legacy/UEFI so I would also make sure to:

  1. Update the iDRAC and BIOS.
  2. Set it to UEFI not Legacy BIOS.
  3. Reinstall Ubuntu once you're absolutely sure UEFI mode is up and running. Double check in the iDRAC that it is actually set to UEFI and it's not pending.
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  • Thanks Grant! You are probably right. I was using "legacy bios" because I could not figure out how to format an ESP partition in the ubuntu installer, it was not in the list of options... Apr 3, 2023 at 3:01
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What I ended up doing was using the SD for /boot and turning off the boot flag on the HD. I suspect that physically removing the SD card would also have worked but that would have required someone to visit the data centre....

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