Hello,

I decided to give my computer an upgrade to an SSD (from a HDD) and it all went well until I tried booting from the internal SATA connection (I have an ASUS Q200E (X202e?) laptop). The BIOS simply doesn't detect any boot options on the SSD. I thought it was something wrong with my partitioning but when I plugged the SSD into a SATA to USB adapter, the BIOS was able to find the GRUB on my SSD and it came up as a boot option. The entry was listed as Seagate Cable USB 2.0.

Interestingly the old HDD has trouble detecting grub via internal SATA as well. The only option listed is the Windows boot manager, which attempts to do boot repair. When I plug in the HDD via the USB adapter, it detects the GRUB boot option perfectly.

One thing I noticed when plugging the SSD via USB was that the number of detected sectors is one less than when plugged into the SATA port. (234441647 vs 234441648). As a result, gdisk declares the GPT table to be corrupted (the backup one).

For both the HDD and the SSD, the GPT table is in some way corrupted when switching interfaces. I bet this has something to do with the BIOS not properly detecting the disks as boot devices.

Some more info:
Both drives have protective MBRs with GPT. Both drives have an EFI system partition and a 2MB Bios boot partition (for GRUB).
My BIOS is Aptio from American Megatrends, version 210.
I have tried various combinations of BIOS settings (CSM on/off, AHCI vs IDE, etc) to no avail.
I can use (and boot into) the partitions on the SSD via SATA if use a GRUB on a different disk (via USB) and the OS loads the root directory and everything functions great. The only problem is getting the BIOS to recognize the drive as bootable via internal SATA. Again, connecting the same drive externally via USB fixes the issue, which is very strange. What exactly does the BIOS look for when scanning the devices? I've tried tricks I found online such as setting the bootable flag on the giant MBR partition but that didn't help. The fact that it works via USB and not SATA makes me think that tricks like this won't help.

What are some reasons that the drive behaves differently from SATA to USB? Any pointers to help debug the issue? Should I be contacting my BIOS / motherboard vendor for support? ASUS? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

Sata and usb would be driver more than any bios limit. Could be a size or CHS issue.

Maybe bios needs to re-discover the drive. Some bios's won't update properly. Does bios see the drive exactly as it is? Either drive.


" old HDD has trouble detecting grub via internal SATA as well" Did it ever work?


Could be some mistake in bios or drive choice or how installed. If you can boot to some media and use installer to see the drive then it should follow that the install should boot also usually.

Is bios seeing the drive?
Do you know which port you plugged into?