[vbox-dev] VirtualBox ignoring boot order

[Martin Simmons]

>>>>> On Sun, 20 Sep 2020 20:35:42 -0600, Dan Egli said:
> 
> I'm wondering about some strange behavior VirtualBox is showing. If you 
> have both a bootable CD and a Bootable hard drive image selected, the CD 
> is NEVER booted. The only way to boot from a CD seems to be when the 
> hard drive does not have boot information. If there IS boot information, 
> then the Hard Disk is ALWAYS the boot source. I've tried everything I 
> can think of. I put the CD above the hard disk in the boot order. I even 
> unselected EVERYTHING EXCEPT the CD drive, and VirtualBox still refuses 
> to boot from a CD if it's hard disk is bootable.
> 
> I'd love some advice here, or is this a bug?

By "boot order" do you mean the values in the VBox dialog Settings > System >
Motherboard?

Those settings seem to have no effect on what EFI uses to boot.  For example,
with a FreeBSD guest on the hard drive, it will not boot (that's probably
expected because I have no EFI partition).  If I then mount an EFI-enabled
FreeBSD CD image, it will boot from the CD even if "Optical" is unchecked in
the VBox settings.

It looks like you can change the EFI boot order from the EFI firmware by
hitting the Esc key immediately after powering on the VM.  See
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=1783241#p1783241

__Martin