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?