edit: I've managed to get around this issue by switching from UEFI to Legacy boot mode. I'm not sure why UEFI is now broken, but this is a good enough solution for now. Thanks

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Original post:

I'm quite frankly baffled by what's happening with my laptop (Dell XPS-13 9343). I've written out the course of events which got me to this point, sorry if it's a bit long. The tl;dr is that some distros work (when not encrypted drives) and some distros are just telling me no bootable drives found, even if not encrypted.

I had an encrypted hard drive with Linux Mint 20 installed. I accidentally let my battery die when using it. I think during the shutdown process I might have closed the lid on the laptop, which maybe made it attempt to start a suspend? In any case, after this I ran into an issue with the laptop booting.

The laptop would get to the unlock screen for encryption (which happens pre-splash screen, immediately after the screen showing the dell logo / hit key to enter bios portion of booting). I would unlock my drive, and then it would show a black screen with a blinking "_" cursor in the top left of the screen. It would never get past this screen.

This is the process the laptop takes when trying to boot back into a suspended session. For normal boots it shows a grub screen with an option to boot LM 20, or boot with a specific kernel, etc before bringing you to the unlock drive encryption screen. I realized I needed to get to this grub screen so I could try booting in safe mode, and I managed to do that by going into a test mode in the bios, and then choosing boot normally. This allowed me to boot the laptop up, but it's a minimal mode without some of the drivers. On reboot it'd get stuck on the unlock encryption screen again without showing grub.

I decided at this point to just reinstall. I chose Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 this time. I installed as normal, this time without encrypting the hard drive. On boot, it displayed a message saying no bootable drives found.

I then decided to try installing a different operating system. I went with the latest version of PopOS. I decided to encrypt this install. It was again stuck at unlock the drive, but PopOS actually displays a text output here if you press escape. I unfortunately don't remember the exact message, but it was failing with something to do with /dev/mapper/cryptswap.

decided to reinstall PopOS without encryption. This actually booted up. I used PopOS for about 10 minutes before deciding to try something else.

I decided to install Fedora 32 Cinnamon. This worked, but I had a hard time getting the broadcom wireless drivers to work, so I downloaded Ubuntu Mate to see if that would work. I installed Ubuntu Mate without encryption, and it's telling me no bootable drives found.

I'm erasing the entire disk, including all partitions when I'm doing these installs. I'd like to use LMDE4 ideally, but if it comes to it I'll just use another distro. More to the point though, why the hell is this happening and how can I fix it? I suspect something on the drive got corrupted when it ran out of battery power, but why would that persist through hard drive wipes?

It's very difficult to reply because you could have 2 unrelated problems, and one of them is invalid now because you reinstalled.
Please edit your first post, or open a new thread, with a technical descritpion of only 1 current problem.

You want me to edit my post to remove information? It seems to me that the problems are related, because both problems appeared at the same time and either one problem appears or the other problem appears depending on whether I enabled encryption. It just seems unlikely that they are unrelated, but I'll edit the post to remove information if you still believe them to be unrelated.