General question about the boot process

[steeve]

a very general question - is this scenario possible or just rubbish?

in a machine with several hard drives, bios directs control to the drive marked as bootable. but that drive has an empty MBR. so no boot is possible and bios freezes

 

[steeve]

no ideas on this?

 

[Leeky]

As I understand it, BIOS passes over to the hard disk marked as 1st priority, and reads the MBR from that disk.

BIOS wouldn't freeze. If it was unable to find a suitable disk to boot from it would come up with an error stating non-system disk, or OS not found, or words to that effect.

I boot my PC with 1x SSD, 1x 320GB WD, 1x 1TB F3, and 2x 2TB F4's, and just set my SSD as the first disk in the hard disk priority preferences.

 

[steeve]

do you think if bios freezes, it means that the hard drive is faulty?

 

[Leeky]

One sure way to find out is to remove the lead on the hard disk in question, then see what BIOS does.

 

[steeve]

if that drive is not connected, the system boots fine...

 

[Leeky]

That would prove the hard disk theory.

If the "faulty" hard disk was set to boot first, try changing it to another disk as first to boot, and see if it boots fine then as well.

If it boots fine with the troublesome disk connected, then clearly there is an issue with the disk your questioning.