The motherboard fails to recognize boot drives yet identifies them.
The motherboard fails to recognize boot drives yet identifies them.
I've been running an old PC with a Minecraft server on and off for three years. The machine has an A10-6700 APU, 16GB DDR3 RAM, and a GT620 processor. It's essentially a refurbished Acer TC-130. Over the past few years, I've swapped out several parts—hard drives, operating systems like Windows 8.1, 10, and 11 (even though they're unsupported), plus Ubuntu Server. The server was functioning last week before I replaced the mechanical hard drive with my main PC to improve loading times. The drive failed a day later, though the reason remains unclear.
I moved the Minecraft server onto a 500GB SATA SSD and ran it under Ubuntu Server. I finished rendering the game world and inserted the SSD into the server. It restarted or booted from the correct media. I've tried multiple drives, different cables, and even attempted BIOS changes, but my knowledge is limited. A few RAM sticks and cables worked, but after removing the USB stick during installation, the system couldn't detect a boot device.
I've also experimented with a blank drive and installing Ubuntu Server on it using boot media, though that only worked during installation. The power supply unit handling the drives seems to be working fine. There are two links provided for troubleshooting: one for booting without a keyboard and another for getting the system to recognize the SSD.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
It seems you installed Ubuntu on this drive while likely having another operating system present, and there isn’t a bootloader partition available. A fresh install directly on the hardware should resolve the issue, which is unusual. You might want to verify your BIOS settings—check if legacy or UEFI is enabled—and try switching them. Also, consider using the Fixing Boot Failure guide from this article to restore a bootable state for Ubuntu.
I'll check the article to see if I can improve it. The main issue is that I'm feeling quite desperate about keeping the current data in Linux. I already have the complete world generated, which would take a long time again—especially on slower hardware, possibly taking a month. Thanks for the link; I'll read it now.
The unusual behavior is that the bios recognizes the device yet fails to appear in the boot selection menu even though the operating system is present. This problem remains consistent across different drives, windows, and Linux environments, suggesting it isn't related to a bootloader malfunction. It seems more likely connected to storage or driver issues rather than initial startup processes.