Stupid bioses that won't boot Debian off an external usb drive

I have a usb hard drive that I've installed debian 9.3 on. It's pretty useful to boot off the usb, and I've been able to move the usb drive to different systems quite easily.


However, there are some bioses that are pure #%@#$@#%.

I tried it on an Dell Inspiron 530 and it boots up debian but isn't able to get past the fsck of the boot drive, throwing up weird errors like inode past extent. Which has been fine on a bunch of other systems.

The bios is 1.0.18 dated 02/24/2009.

The other k-rappy bios is on an HP 6742p. For some reason it doesn't want to boot, dropping me to a funny grub console


You'd think that they'd test this. Surely I'm not the only person who wants to run an os off a usb drive.

A couple of times I've had to edit the grub by hitting e upon the debian boot screen and change drives from /dev/sda2 to /dev/sdb2 or something like that.

Booting to a USB drive with debian just works on my Dell Optiplexes and about every Dell laptop that I've thrown at it. So it can be done.