Question Notebook won't boot but SSD is recognized

[GuiRitter]

Hi everyone.

I have a Dell Inspiron I15-5558-D30 with a Kingston SUV400S37/240G SSD.

In the SSD I have an UEFI dual boot with Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and Debian Buster x64.

Recently I replaced this SSD by an old HDD which I use to test different distros of ROS.

It failed to detect a bootable media and started a memory self test, which found nothing and solved nothing.

Then I installed the SSD again. Same thing.

I suspect the SATA connector, which suffered some abuse in the past*.

To test it, I installed a Debian Buster Live x64 in a pen drive and booted from it. The SSD is recognized and I can see the files of both OSes.

Just to see what would happen, I marked the EXT4 partition where Debian is installed as bootable using gparted and restarted. No change.

I also removed the battery and the CMOS battery and pressed the power button for a few seconds. After reassembling, no change.

Is it possible to make it work again? Please tell me what other information is needed and what tests can I perform.

Thanks in advance.

P.S.: About that abuse to the SATA connector. The first time that I installed another HD I didn't knew how it worked. I unscrewed the HD and tried to disconnect the connector from the HD. I had to use a lot of force. When it came out, it also came out of the motherboard. I was shocked, I thought I had broken it! Upon further inspection, I realized that the SATA connector connects to the motherboard via a connector that flips open, so it was just a matter of connecting it back and flipping it closed. Still, the yanking might have introduced a bad contact in the connector.

 

[popatim]

Have you tried resetting the bios by removing the battery & ac cord and then holding the power button in for 3 minutes?

 

[GuiRitter]

Have you tried resetting the bios by removing the battery & ac cord and then holding the power button in for 3 minutes?

Like I said, I did that, but only for a few seconds. I never heard of this procedure taking this much time, but I'll give it a shot.

P.S.: Did it. No change.

 

[popatim]

Which OS was the boot loader?

 

[GuiRitter]

Which OS was the boot loader?

GRUB, as I installed Debian after installing Windows.

 

[popatim]

I'll move this to our 'Open Source' section of the forums and hope one of the Linux guru's can help repair grub.

 

[GuiRitter]

I wasn't thinking it likely to be a GRUB problem but, since the issue has been raised, I had the idea of trying to use Hiren's Boot, which is capable of booting whatever OS it detects.

However, the Hiren's Boot that I had was of an old version that didn't support UEFI, so I downloaded Hiren's Boot PE. Problem is, this version doesn't contain the pre OS menu that the old one had.

So I searched for something that did what the old version of Hiren's Boot used to do and I found Super Grub2 Disk. I booted into it and selected "Detect and show boot methods".

About 1 minute and 15 seconds later, I get a truckload of options. One of them says "Entries from... (hd2,gpt6)/boot/grub/grub.cfg". Below that are the exact same options I used to see back when it worked. And selecting one of these options successfully boots in both my OSes!

As it has been mentioned that a GRUB repair is in order, I went further and tested whether installing GRUB from scratch wouldn't solve my issues. I used the other HDD and installed Debian Buster in one of the 4 partitions that were already there, this one being empty. At the end, I made sure that GRUB would be installed. I booted up but the problem remains.

So, I can still boot by using Super Grub2 Disk, but reinstalling GRUB doesn't fix it. That's why I still suspect it's a hardware issue.