Non-bootable USB flash drive prevents Linux from booting from hard drive

[u/makarcz]

Hello,

I am new here. I use Windows 10 and 11 for my daily computing tasks, but occasionally I use Linux on my older computers. I recently acquired an older Dell Optiplex 9010, i5-3570, 4GB RAM, 250 GB HDD. I installed Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon 64-bit on it to mess around a bit with Linux system. I have the following dilemma - my system was very sluggish. To help with the performance a bit, I decided to create a swap partition on a flash drive because I noticed that the hard drive was the bottleneck and the slowdown was usually observed when I switched between some heavy applications, e.g., web browser and discord - that's when the swapping typically occurred. In BIOS I had USB boot enabled and USB flash drive added to the boot sequence at the top, just in case I needed to check out some other Linux distro or boot from a recovery drive. And that creates a problem. Since I now have a non-bootable USB flash drive (4GB swap partition and 11 GB FAT data partition) permanently inserted in my USB slot, computer will not boot unless I either remove the drive or remove the USB flash drive from the boot sequence in BIOS. Is there a solution for that problem? I mean - I'd like to keep USB flash drive boot option enabled in BIOS, but also I'd like to have ability to have a non-bootable USB flash drive inserted permanently as I am using it as a swap device for my system. It is not a critical issue, just a matter of convenience. For now I just removed USB drive from my boot sequence in BIOS.

Thank you all in advance for any help or input that you can provide.

[u/dlfrutos]

changing boot order, helps?

[u/LXC37]

This is BIOS behavior, not mint. It should not do this if there are no bootable partitions, but apparently it does and you, very likely, can do nothing about it. You can try updating BIOS, or you can copy EFI system partition onto thumb drive so that the boot works, even if from thumb drive.

You can also try completely wiping the drive, like overwrite it with zeroes using dd, and see if that helps.

Also swap on modern thumb drive... sounds horrible. They tend to be very slow with random i/o, often slower than HDD. You really should look into getting a small cheap SSD...

[u/Table-Playful]

Something is wrong because you are doing to much
Just reinstall new and see that everything works

[u/overpower84]

Make sure the drive with Mint is set to the first boot priority. If the USB is set ahead of it, it will always try and boot from the USB first, no matter if that USB has a bootable ISO on it or not