POS system trashing hard drives during install

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 17 Dec 2015, John McDonnell wrote:

> The installer boots up and runs through the process perfectly fine. 
> But upon rebooting after install, the system locks up. It runs the 
> memory check and displays the connected IDE devices (the hard drive 
> and CD-ROM drive) and the keyboard is still semi-responsive, I can hit 
> Del or F9 and it will display "Entering BIOS" or "Loading Boot Device 
> List" but that is all that happens. It doesn't actually go into the 
> BIOS or do anything and CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn't restart the system, I 
> have to hard power down. If I disconnect the hard drive at this point, 
> the system boots fine.

It took some looking to find this description of the problem in the 
post.

Some systems do stupid things based on what they find on the hard disk. 
Lenovo and IBM before them did this, for example.  Still do, in some 
cases.  It is not just a GPT thing, they did stupid things with MBR 
partitions also.  The idea that old systems can't boot from GPT is 
incorrect.  GPT has the PMBR, a backwards-compatible MBR booting 
mechanism.

Some systems require a system partition for the BIOS.

Given that this is a custom system, there might be some kind of security 
information stored on the drive.

If it were me, I would use gpart to look at the partitioning on the XP 
drive.  It is likely MBR, but the number, type, and size of partitions 
could be a clue.