Arch Linux

pefrase

Member

From: New York

Registered: 2011-03-06

Posts: 6

Website

[SOLVED] Can't boot to hard drive, only USB

Bear with me, as I'm not absolutely sure this is an Arch issue--it could be hardware related, I'm not sure.

Today I replaced the CPU cooler on my machine, after not having restarted for a week or so. After putting everything back together, the machine would no longer boot. Instead, after POST and after the BIOS loaded successfully I would get a black screen that just said "Boot error", with no other information provided. I wasn't able to boot from the DVD drive either, but that may be a separate issue because I had some issues with that drive earlier. I was able to boot Arch from a USB stick, and then I was able to mount all of my partitions and set up a chroot environment, confirming that the BIOS recognizes the drives, they are all accessible, and the data is intact. I updated all my packages with Pacman, and rebuilt my ramdisk image with mkinitcpio. Still no luck, same error.

I've tried all the tricks I could think of: reinstall the BIOS, reset CMOS with the jumper, take out all but one stick of ram, switch the SATA ports around, unplug and replug stuff to the motherboard. Nothing works.

The boot and root partitions are on an OCZ Vertex SSD, the home partition and some media partitions are on three separate HDDs, and the motherboard is an Asrock A770DE+, if that matters. Maybe this is a motherboard issue and not Arch, but it's a pretty bizarre thing to have happen, so I'm posting here in the hopes that somebody can help me out! I don't know what further information would be helpful, but I'll provide whatever I can.

Last edited by pefrase (2014-03-17 20:37:36)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,676

Re: [SOLVED] Can't boot to hard drive, only USB

No solution, but what boot loader are you using?  What are the file system types from which you are booting?  Confirm there are no RAIDs and now encrypted volumes.
You said BIOS, so I assume we are not talking about UEFI.

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pefrase

Member

From: New York

Registered: 2011-03-06

Posts: 6

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Can't boot to hard drive, only USB

Well, I guess something got corrupted while I was doing maintenance--I ended up wiping out my /boot and / partitions and reinstalling Arch, and now everything works again, more or less.