Samsung AHCI SM951 SSD Boot

[fjgaude]

Has anyone using Ubuntu been successful in booting the subject drive? If so please tell me how you did it.

Thanks you!

[oldfred]

I saw in another thread that you have an Asus motherboard.
I have just a Samsung 840 pro on a standard SATA port in an Asus z97-AR motherboard.
I had to change a lot of settings in UEFI to get it to recognize UEFI boot of flash drive and install to SSD.
Have you updated UEFI? I just updated to 2501 and it reset everything back to defaults.
Did you change to "other" for OS type?
Did you turn on boot with UEFI only.
SATA support all devices, should be default
USB support full initialization.
I turned off fast boot for cold boot. Normal boot
Set fast boot to 3 sec for warm boot.
Turned off network boot so it would not look for that.

But you may have other settings for your S2 SSD?

[fjgaude]

Thanks for coming to assist! I've been trying to read all your advise on the linked thread.

I have an Asus Z97i Plus MB with two SSDs, one a Samsung, the other a Plextor, plus a VelociRaptor HDD running Ubuntu Unity 14.04.3 and 15.10 Beta, on several partitions. I boot normally off the Samsung 850 EVO, very quick.

I also have an ASRock Z87 in another box with booting Plextor M6e and another Plextor SSD.

I've tried many setting in the UEFI BIOS of the Asus without being able to boot from the SM951. I have huge amount of data on one of its two partitions. On the other I've tried 14.04 and 15.10 without success. I see the boot partition on the grub of my main boot drive, the 850 EVO but selecting it just gets me back to the grub menu.

I carefully record all the things you suggest and perform them in the BIOS and see what happens.

It seems as maybe another issue is the efi and UEFI situation with the later .iso Linux OSs. Will have to understand it all sooner or later. <smile>

[oldfred]

My old BIOS system was from 2006 & 2009. Later I thought I would get a new UEFI system which for PC was pretty new, but bought a small SSD. It made old system so good I could not justify new system, but followed UEFI.
I started converting all new drives in 2010 to gpt as I then thought I would soon go to UEFI. I added an efi partition and bios_grub so I could boot my old system with BIOS, but later convert to UEFI. But new system got new drives and did not use the older drives anyway.

Post the link to the Create BootInfo summary report. Is part of Boot-Repair:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Info

[fjgaude]

Thanks again, trying to catch up on all the understanding. Oh, my BIOS is the latest, 2605! Handles all the latest CPUs and NVMe drives.

Will print out your suggestions and go into the BIOS. Will report on results later today or tomorrow.

[fjgaude]

Well, I made sure all the items you suggested were in place... I then could see the UEFI BIOS would allow me to only boot UEFI drives and the OS didn't respond to them.

It seems that the other drives are loaded with non-UEFI software, 14.04 and 15.10, likely. I think I installed 15.10 on the SM951 as UEFI but Linux simply doesn't see it. All my other partitions have non-UEFI OSs.

All my drives are ms-dos partitions, no GPT partitions. I wonder if that is my problem? I'm not trying to install any Windows, have it set for no secure boot, boot "legacy and UEFI" drives.

Understand this is not a normal SSD issue. I have several SSD partitions that boot using ms-dos style boot loading. It's just this Samsung AHCI SM951 that will not boot. I have not found any Linux user who has booted it.

After some more study I'll see if I have to convert all my drives to GPT. What a horrible thought! <smile>

Thanks again, oldfred, for the help and discussion.

[oldfred]

You do not have to convert to gpt.
But if you want to use UEFI or use it in the future best to plan conversion as/when convenient.
Windows only boots from MBR with BIOS.
Windows only boots from gpt with UEFI.
But Ubuntu can boot from gpt with either UEFI or BIOS if you have correct supporting partitions on gpt drive. For BIOS you need a bios_grub and for UEFI you need a ESP - efi system partition.

In CSM/BIOS mode system should work. I think one of my settings makes it UEFI only as I could only boot flash drive in UEFI mode with it set to UEFI only. It would not boot in UEFI mode with the setting that was UEFI & CSM.

[help_me2]

Sometimes is as simple as installing Ubuntu on the SSD drive first with the other drive unplugged. Then hookup the other drive and run"sudo update-grub" on the SSD. Just a thought that has worked for me before.

[fjgaude]

Thanks, I'm learning!

[fjgaude]

Yes, and thanks... While booted to the partition I wish to be first, point to that drive in the BIOS, I use update-grub, then grub-install /dev/sdx to that drive. Works fine!