Can not boot from hard drive
 

I have a Lenovo Z570 that will not boot from the hard drive.

I booted it up to Mint Mate 17.3 from the USB and installed Mate with no problem.

When I try to boot it up from the hard drive I get a message "PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable". I have the USB, CD, and hard drive in my bios boot list before the network so I should not get the media test failure. I then get a boot menu that says boot menu and app menu at the top with a list of devices which are not in the same order as the bios boot menu. When I select the hard drive I get the media test failure again followed by the same boot menu again. If I select the app menu I can select setup and get the bios setup.

Gparted shows:
/dev/sda1 fat32 512.00 Mib 4.39 Mib 507.61 Mib boot
/dev/sda2 ext2 244.00 Mib 58.36 Mib 185.64 Mib
/dev/sda3 lvm2 pv mint-vg 697.90 Gib 0.00 B lvm

Can someone help me out? Thank you.

Hello,

First I would open up and check my bios again. If possible disable optical and network(PXE boot) completely.

Then do a default restore on my bios if the above didn't work.

After that I would check the drive to see if it's having trouble:

Above can be done from a live cd.

Next, maybe check the cable for the drive. Make sure it isn't damaged and is making full contact(If separated also make sure the power cable is making full contact).

If you can't get to the drive. As a last resort, try to start over by removing the file system, and adding it again.

I would say that you have PXE as 1st device in "Bios Boot Priority"

Did you manually partition the drive because linux doesn't use Fat partitions

Bios boot order
 

My bios boot order is:
1. USB FDD:
2. ATAPI CD: TSSTcorp CDDVDW TS-L633F
3. ATA HDD: WDC WD7500BPVT-24HXZT3
4. USB HDD:
5. USB CD:
6. PCI LAN: Realtek PXE B03 D00

I don't know how to remove these devices or why I have 3 USBs.

Loading the defaults moved the hard drive to number two ahead of the CD giving me the same results when I tried to boot.

Smartctl did not log any errors.

This is a laptop. I did not see any cables but I did remove the drive and reseat it.

A few days ago I did use Gparted and DBAN to try and remove all partitions before trying to install Mint. I do not get any errors when installing Mint so I think I might have a problem with the master boot record or grub. The boot menu that I am getting does not look like the menu that I get when I boot from the USB or CD.

Thanks for everyones help.

How laptop behaves if you launching boot menu and pointing directly to your HDD?
Can you access your HDD partitions when booting from USB installation media?
Did you install GRUB bootloader at all?

Two file systems on hard drive
 

When it comes up with the odd boot menu and I select the hard drive I get the same media device error and then the same odd boot menu. I did not install grub manualy but I can access two file systems on the hard drive. The 256 Mib file system has a efi and grub directory and the 745 Gib file system looks like a linux system starting with bin, boot, and cdrom directories. I think the Mint install installed grub but I never see a menu that says grub on it.

Picture of boot menu
 

Here is a picture of the boot menu. I don't know where it's coming from or why it does not have all the options that the bios has.

Looks like grub installation failed/wrong. HDD has no boot code and/or boot flag set.
I'd boot live media, chroot into installed system and run grub-install and update-grub.

Researching chroot and grub install
 

I don't know how chroot works or how to install grub so I will need to do some research. Gparted did show the partition as boot and EFI. I have legacy enabled in the bios but I disabled it and it didn't make a difference. Is EFI the same as UEFI? Thank you.

If you have another bootable drive with grub on it, you can use it's grub to boot the install first time and avoid the chroot. Just boot the linux that grub points at and run "update-grub" and "nano /boot/grub/grub.cfg" to verify that it found it and set it up right. Then reboot that grub and select your install from the menu. Once in your destination install then install and configure grub. You don't have to chroot (until you do). Although most times when you need to chroot, there's passwords to change or packages to install (like a bootable kernel), so you can actually boot and use the thing you're chroot-ing into.

Set hard dis password frozen
 

While looking through the bios I saw where the set hard disk password was set to frozen. I don't know if that has anything to do with my problem. I am downloading Hiren's boot CD to see if I can reset the hard disk password. Thank you for the suggestions on installing grub. I did see grub on the hard disk and will try your suggestions. Thank you.

IE vs AHCI
 

I have it working now by changing the SATA setting from AHCI to IDE and reinstalling Mint. After it worked with IDE I change it back to AHCI and it still boots. Found the suggestion in a Windows forum. Thanks for everyone's suggestions.

Hard disk password unfrozen.
 

I notice that the harddisk password is now unfrozen and the partitions are now different.

/dev/sda1 ext4 / 694.72 Gib 15.93 Gib 678.79 Gib boot
/dev/sda2 extended 3.91 Gib
/dev/sda5 linux-swap 3.91 Gib 4.00 Kib 3.91 Gib