Hi guys,
I have a problem booting OMV when an external USB drive is connected and need your guidance.
I first installed OMV on the internal hdd (500 GB) of an old PC. When I learned that OMV can't use the remaining space on the internal hdd for my personal data because OMV reserves the whole disk for itself, I installed OMV on a 32 GB USB stick. By doing this, OMV could mount the internal hdd as a data store for my personal data. Some days later, I mounted an external 5 TB USB hard drive for my backups. Everything worked fine until I needed to restart OMV. After restart, the old OMV installation on the internal hdd got booted instead of OMV installation of the USB stick!
I might solve this issue by going into the boot menu in order to deactivate the internal hdd to be booted from but since my OMV-PC is headless (it has no monitor, no keyboard and no mouse), I wanted to solve the issue just via ssh shell.
I came across of this post, which finally just suggests to run update-grub but this didn't solve my issue. As soon as I attached my external 5 TB USB hdd, OMV will boot from the internal hdd instead of the 32 GB USB stick.
Since this did not solve the issue, I removed the bootable flag from the internal hdd (see instructions how I proceeded). However, OMV still booted from the internal hdd as long as the external 5 TB USB drive was attached.
So I made a backup of the master boot record (mbr) of the internal hdd. Then I deleted the mbr without its partition tables of the internal hdd (see instructions how I proceeded). Now, OMV did not boot any longer as long as the external 5 TB USB hdd is attached.
Here are all occurrences of sd from my grub config:
root@openmediavault:~# cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg | grep sd
insmod part_msdos
set root='hd1,msdos1'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd1,msdos1 --hint-efi=hd1,msdos1 --hint-baremetal=ahci1,msdos1 a33099b0-ee6a-4e4e-b04e-74715e146923
insmod part_msdos
set root='hd1,msdos1'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd1,msdos1 --hint-efi=hd1,msdos1 --hint-baremetal=ahci1,msdos1 a33099b0-ee6a-4e4e-b04e-74715e146923
insmod part_msdos
set root='hd1,msdos1'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd1,msdos1 --hint-efi=hd1,msdos1 --hint-baremetal=ahci1,msdos1 a33099b0-ee6a-4e4e-b04e-74715e146923
# linux installation on /dev/sda1.
menuentry "Debian GNU/Linux (on /dev/sda1)" {
set root=(hostdisk//dev/sda,msdos1)
# linux installation on /dev/sda1.
menuentry "Debian GNU/Linux, mit Linux 5.7.0-0.bpo.2-amd64 (on /dev/sda1)" {
set root=(hostdisk//dev/sda,msdos1)
# linux installation on /dev/sda1.
menuentry "Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 5.7.0-0.bpo.2-amd64 (recovery mode) (on /dev/sda1)" {
set root=(hostdisk//dev/sda,msdos1)
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Here are my block devices when OMV booted correctly from the 32 GB USB stick (the 5TB USB hdd has been mounted after boot):
root@openmediavault:~# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465,8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 457,9G 0 part /srv/dev-disk-by-id-ata-TOSHIBA_MQ01ACF050_Y5CYCD8GT-part1
├─sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
└─sda5 8:5 0 7,9G 0 part
sdb 8:16 1 28,7G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 1 20,7G 0 part /
├─sdb2 8:18 1 1K 0 part
└─sdb5 8:21 1 7,9G 0 part
sdc 8:32 0 4,6T 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 0 128M 0 part
└─sdc2 8:34 0 4,6T 0 part
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Here are my block devices when OMV booted incorrectly from the 500 GB internal hdd (the 5TB USB hdd was attached during boot):
root@openmediavault:~# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465,8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 457,9G 0 part /
├─sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
└─sda5 8:5 0 7,9G 0 part [SWAP]
sdb 8:16 0 4,6T 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 128M 0 part
└─sdb2 8:18 0 4,6T 0 part
sdc 8:32 1 28,7G 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 1 20,7G 0 part
├─sdc2 8:34 1 1K 0 part
└─sdc5 8:37 1 7,9G 0 part
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I'd be glad to know how I have to configure OMV so that it always boots from the 32 GB USB stick. Thanks in advance for your help!