Weird HD problem when turning PC on

QueBert

Lifer
Jan 6, 2002
22,759
990
126
DFI Lanparty MB, I have 3 HD's with my AHCI turned on in my BIOS. My drive with Windows 7 & Ubuntu is set as the 1st boot device. But when I turn my PC on I get "INVALID SYSTEM DISC" unless I press escape before it tries to access to the drive to go into the MB's boot selection menu. When I go into the menu I select my 1TB WD Black and my boot loader comes up fine. I'm definitely selecting the same drive that's set as the 1st boot HD in my BIOS when I'm pressing escape. I'm not exactly concerned here, but I am confused. The only thing I can come up with is when I press ESC it's somehow accessing a different boot loader, that doesn't make much sense to me. But it's about all I could come up with. I'm thinking I could just reinstall GRUB and that would fix it, but I'm curious why one method works and the other doesn't. So I'd like to know what's going on here before I just put a new GRUB loader on.
 

C1

Platinum Member
Feb 21, 2008
2,359
101
106
So what happens if during boot, you quickly hit "ESC" twice?

Occams Razor says that the "ESC" is pre-empting some code that somehow got installed that is redirecting the boot process. Usually this is the result of messing around with multiple OS installations. Inspect your boot loader files (on first 2K bytes of HDD) and make the proper adjustment.
 

QueBert

Lifer
Jan 6, 2002
22,759
990
126
I usually press ESC a bunch of times, if I press it once I never seem to time it right and I get the disc failure message. I can reinstall the boot loader I figured that what it had to be, had just never seen anything do this in all my years on PCs.
 

ElenaP

Member
Dec 25, 2009
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www.ReclaiMe.com
Theoretically, if the disk you select manually is the same that is selected for automatic startup, the boot process should be the same regardless of the selection method. Hence, this should not be a boot loader issue.

Did you positively checked that the first boot device is set to the hard drive? Is it somehow possible that there is an USB flash drive or a memory card forgotten somewhere and it actually tries USB boot first?