NAS not booting with HDD, only without HDD

[PeterT]

Hi, 

I have a NAS, (specs below), and i installed OpenMediaVault 4 to it. Without the HDD plugged in (just the usb drive), everything working fine. But when i switch it off and plug in the hdd which i wanna use for storage, the boot stops at a certain point. If i boot without the hdd plugged in, and plug it after it loaded, the system works fine. The hdd had been formatted, and there are personal files on it, nothing "bootable". Tried changing the boot order in bios, but nothing. I think maybe the grub loader trying to search for boot files on the hdd, and not the usb pendrive, which is where the openmediavault had been installed. But that`s just my thoughts. I`m not really familiar with linux systems. I linked a video in which i boot with the drive, and it stucks. Thanks for the answers, guys.

Specs: 

ASUS J3455M-E with Intel® Celeron® Quad-Core J3455 SoC onboard Processor

1 WD 500GB HDD (i will by 2 WD 2TB NAS drive in the future)

4 GB DDR3 

[brwainer]

based on the video, you are definitely getting past GRUB and into linux - your initram appears to load fine. initram is a small file that contains the bare essentials to start the rest of the boot process. I haven't looked at it closely and I only played it once, but I thought I saw an mdadm error flash past about 5 seconds before the video ended. mdadm is the linux software raid system, it is also referred to as md-raid.

 

EDIT: I paused the video and went through frame by frame, not that there was a lot there to look at. Without seeing what a clean boot looks like, and without other details about the installation, my guess is that you might have mdadm on both drives, and they are conflicting in some way that they can be mounted individually, but not together. I'm not experienced enough with mdadm to know for sure what might be going wrong. What I can say is that mdadm appears to be trying to mount a volume (the USB I guess) and then because it can't, various other parts of the boot process can't complete.

[PeterT]

So what should i do? I tried formatting the hdd again, so there isn't "mdadm" on both drives, as you mentioned. But having the same screen stuck. 

[Undergrid]

Under linux (and IIRC, it's been a while) USB drives generally show up as /dev/sd(x) devices.  I would guess that adding the hard drive has changed the location of your boot USB from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb (the screen is certainly showing something on sdb) and the boot sequence can't find the next thing it needs because it's looking for it on the HDD.

 

Check your BIOS with both the HDD and USB drive plugged in, see if there's anything that will allow you to change the boot order and/or drive order (different BIOS's call it different things). 

[PeterT]

Thanks for the answer, when i boot, there's an option to edit the booting "command", and there, i can change it to /dev/sdb/, i trying it now. 

[PeterT]

Ok, it worked, thanks a lot.  I just changed in the boot settings sda1 to sdb1.