Question Boot Device not Found

[D4rkW4t3r]

Hi Everyone, super brand new here. Just looking for some advice on what to do about this issue.
I have a Dell optiplex 755 I got for free, I am looking to turn it into a media type center hooked up to a TV, light web browsing, netflix usage and DVD player.
I know its a super old system, I'm fine with that. I plan on getting a few small upgrades for it soon.

The problem came up after I tried time and time to install any sort of operating system on it. (It was used as a specialty system for security camera monitoring and had a custom OS running built by the security camera company.) The only way I could figure out how to get rid of it was D's Boot and Nuke.

So I nuked the hard drive to oblivion, and since then I have gotten certain distros of linux to boot on it, like Damn Small Linux and it seems to work fine. But I can't for the life of me Install anything to the hard drive. It isn't being recognized.

I would like to install Lubuntu on it, but the hard drive isn't available to install to.
Then I started trying to format and partition the hard drive using GParted boot and partition tool, but when I do that it doesn't boot to the GUI, just some text prompts and half of the screen is cut off so I can't make selections.

What is the best way to get this hard drive functioning and able to install an OS to?
sorry for how long this is. I just feel like its been a long journey for this old HDD and you need to know its origin story 😛

 

[popatim]

The drive may be connected to a raid controller or may be a pair of drives in raid mode.
Can you open the 755 and see what you have please?

Also check the bios and see if the drive is listed in the Sata port section.

 

[D4rkW4t3r]

I don't think it was ever set up for RAID, it only has one hard drive. In the BIOS it does say there is something switched on in SATA1.

I opened it up, got the optical drive out and got the hard drive out and hooked it up to my other machine running ubuntu. I opened up the disk manager and I see the drive. And it has a ton of partitions. So im formatting and erasing what i can. Is therr a good way to just remove all thr partitions?

Any other tips on getting this thing functional while its hooked up to my other system that way I dont have to reinstall it to its case only to find out its still not bootable?

 

[D4rkW4t3r]

I've formatted this hard drive using a separate system, then I put it back in the optiplex 755 and it still isn't able to be used to install Lubuntu. The BIOS knows that it's there but it can't be accessed?

 

[D4rkW4t3r]

I finally got this system working by changing the boot order of things and installing Ubuntu on it. Now i have a 10 year old system running as a netflix and brower game box for the living room tv.