I'm not sure if I have a H/W or S/W problem, so I'm starting here.

I recently installed a new O/S (Bunsenlabs Hydrogen). Everything seemed to go ok, but when the system was rebooted, I brought up the boot menu and selected "Bootable Hard Drive". The "Hard Drive Boot Menu" came up and my only choice was "Bootable Add-in Cards".

During installation, I had selected /dev/sda as the drive to have grub installed on. In the past, whenever I did an install, my /dev/sda drive always came up in the "Hard Drive Boot Menu", but not now.

I ran boot repair and it said it ran successfully, but when I reboot I still get the "Bootable Add-in Cards" as my only choice when booting from hard disk. I'm attaching the text of the last screen displayed by bootrepair.

Can anyone help me get to where I can boot from /dev/sda master boot record?

Jim A.

Attached Files

bootRepairNote.txt (365 Bytes, 15 views)

Is this UEFI, UEFI in CSM mode. Is the hard drive partitioned as MBR or GPT. In case of GPT partitioning and MBR boot, was there protective MBR created and your boot partition marked as bootable?

You need to run boot repair selecting the option to Create BootInfo Summary and paste a link to it here as instructed. The little note you attached doesn't provide any information.

Well it does actually have that link ...

Indeed it does:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/18875643/

Enter BIOS and check for your HDD, is it listed there? If so navigate to BIOS Boot section and set HDD as first boot device and set your hdd as first hard drive.

To all: Yesterday was a busy day - too many commitments. But I am back at it today.

@emerson - No, this is not a UEFI PC. It is an old PC.


@yancek

I was going to follow your advise, but Teufel's post led me a solution, so all is good. I probably should have put the link in my post instead of in the attachment. It makes it easier for everyone. I will try to remember to avoid short attachments like that in the future.

@beachboy - Thanks for posting the link! My apologies to all.

@Teufel

In BIOS, I went the the 'Drives' section. I have 2 SATA hard drive on the PC. In the past, they have worked with no problem. I was surprised to see that SATA-0 and SATA-1 were turn 'off'. I changed that to 'on'. I then went back to the 'HDD Boot Sequence'. Since this problem started, this section has listed:

Despite marking SATA-0 and SATA-1 as 'on', the listing for the 'HDD Boot Sequence' has not changed.

When I look at the BIOS 'Boot Sequence' is shows:

This PC has 2 SATA drives but BIOS section was still not showing them as present. But I figured I may as well reboot and maybe the BIOS menu will show the SATA drives. Happily, the PC booted properly and I did not get back into the BIOS menu. So problem solved!

In summary, it looks like the problem was caused because boot menu SATA drives option got turned 'off'. Strange that a power failure would cause that and I don't think loaded a new OS would do that either so I really don't know the true cause. All is well that ends well. Thanks to all for the suggestions and advise.

To see any changes you have to save changes (usually F10 key), exit BIOS and enter there again.