[SeaBIOS] SeaBIOS doesn't boot from secondary hard drive with OS if primary hard drive is empty

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 02:50:51PM +0300, Аладышев Константин wrote:
> When I have 2 SATA disks attached to my board, and only second priority
> device is with OS, SeaBIOS doesn't boot.
> 
> The "empty" disk doesn't have MBR, so SeaBIOS doesn't stuck on it, it goes
> to the end message "No bootable device.  Retrying in 60 seconds."
> 
> But if I manually press "ESC" and choose correct disk in interactive promt,
> system boots successfully.
> 
> Two logs attached to the message (with and without "ESC" interaction). I use
> SeaBIOS (d7adf6044a4c772b497e97272adf97426b34a249) as a payload to coreboot.
> 

That's a limitation of the BIOS design - only one drive can be
designated as "C:" and only that hard drive is bootable (without a
full reboot).  So, there's no good way to attempt to boot from a
different hard drive should booting from the first hard drive fail.

You can change the default order of drives and thus change which drive
gets designated as "C:".  See the bootorder file:

https://www.coreboot.org/SeaBIOS#Configuring_boot_order

-Kevin