The re-entrant coder

Well, I had another one this time. I’m running a Home Theater PC at home based on the fantastic MythTV but recently it failed on me. I couldn’t get it to boot anymore. The PC would start, show the BIOS screen and show the attached discs and then… nothing. As written here, I have had several disk failures in this machine already so I was suspecting that something in the vicinity of my SATA controller had failed internally.
I had left the PC sitting for over a week as I didn’t have time to fix the issue but this Saturday I finally started to look at the problem. After opening up the BIOS and doing several checks if the disks were present I was just about to give up and buy a new motherboard for my PC (it was an old beast to start with). And then my eye fell on the boot order. For some reason, I had this set in the following order

1. boot from USB
2. boot from HD
3. boot from CD

And then the light struck… I had a memory card inserted in its USB adapter that was sitting snugly in the USB hub. I removed it and voila, the system booted! What I still don’t understand is why my BIOS didn’t give me an error that no OS could be found on the memory card…

Related posts:

1. Mucking around with an embedded Linux board (again)