System only boots from USB, not Optical or HDD

[pefrase]

I installed a new CPU cooler because the old one broke. After doing so I have a very strange problem: my system will not boot from the hard disk or the DVD drive, only from a USB stick. POST is fine, and the BIOS splash comes up, and the drives are detected, but then it just says "Boot error" on a black screen and hangs there. After booting from a USB image, I confirmed that the drives are detected and operational, as I was able to mount all of them from the Linux live disk on the USB.

So far, I have tried the following:
- Disconnecting the optical drive and booting only from the hard disk
- Disconnecting the hard disks and booting just from the DVD--this produces a message telling me to insert a bootable disk, even though I have inserted a disk that boots fine on another machine
- Reinstalling the BIOS
- Resetting the CMOS using the on-board jumper
- Taking out all but one stick of memory
- Disconnecting and reconnecting all the connections to the motherboard.

Nothing works! It seems like it has to be something with the motherboard --an Asrock A770DE+, if that matters--but I'm at my wits end about what more I can do.

 

[corroded]

change SATA ports for the HDD and make sure the boot drive is correct in the BIOS.

You may need to do an MBR rebuild...

 

[pefrase]

I've tried switching around the SATA ports for the hard drives (there are four in the system), and I confirmed that the correct drive was listed as the boot device. This still gives the "Boot error" message--whereas if I attempt to boot from one of the non-boot drives, I just get a black screen and a blinking cursor, with no message.

 

[corroded]

ok... what OS are you running and what is the WHOLE error message...

 

[pefrase]

Arch Linux, with the boot partition on an OCZ Vertex SSD drive. And "Boot error" is literally the entirety of the error message. Or, to be a bit more exact, if I disable the splash screen on the BIOS, I see a few lines reporting that all four hard disks have been recognized, and then there is a black screen with a couple of blank lines and then "Boot error", with a blinking cursor below it. If I hit enter, the cursor will go one line lower, but the system doesn't respond to any other commands except ctrl-alt-delete.

 

[corroded]

Hmmm had similar with my OCZ Vertex SSD and Windows7. Turned out to be my SATA controller. Did you ask the Arch communityt forums about this? "No boot, "Boot Error" w/ SSD"

 

[pefrase]

Thanks, I'm giving that a try too--I don't see anything in those forums so far that quite conforms to the issue I'm having.