I just set Vbox boot order to HD > CD/DVD. And added a new blank VDI
for the HD, and a Fedora 22 Live CD ISO for the CD. And it boots from
the CD. So the HD is clearly skipped.
If I partition the HD with fdisk with a single partition and no boot
flag, I get the same result. So clearly this BIOS is also
ignoring/skipping the HD when bootloader code in the first 440 bytes
is absent but otherwise has a valid signature and partition
information.
If I partition a new blank VDI with parted, boot hangs indefinitely
with no error message.
Chris Murphy