I had a small NUC that I use to take to work, an Intel Skylake i5. On Saturday, it suddenly failed totally (would not power on). Happily, it was within warranty, so I returned it to Amazon and a new one arrived. (Actually, Amazon have not collected the old one from my workplace yet, but that is another matter).
I had bought it as a barebones system, so I had my own RAM and M.2 SSD, which I took out of the old one before returning it. I collected the replacement to-day, and installed my RAM and SSD. The hardware seems to work, but I cannot get it to boot from the SSD. I have managed to get it to boot with an Ubuntu 16.04 ISO installed on a USB drive, and it appears to work correctly. I can see the SSD and the various partitions on it.
I had encrypted the SSD using whole device encryption. I remember my passphrase, and was able to unlock when I booted from the USB drive. However, I cannot find any way of making it bootable from the SSD any longer. When I try to boot, the BIOS simply tells me that there are no bootable drives. I have tried:
(1) updating the BIOS to version 54;
(2) checking many different settings in the BIOS and boot menu to see whether it will boot under various configurations (it will not; this system uses UEFI);
(3) manually editing the GRUB configuration file to refer to the correct UUID for the SSD in the new system;
(4) running boot-repair from the USB booted Ubuntu;
(5) running boot-repair from its own boot USB drive; and
(6) running boot-repair from its own boot USB drive in failsafe mode.
Boot repair running under Ubuntu purports to work but has no effect: looking at the logs, what seems to be happening is that it is performing the repair on the USB drive and not on the SSD, which error messages claim cannot be accessed because it is busy.
Boot repair from the bootable USB drive fails: on launching it (after the menu selection to choose a language and start the process), it shows scrolling text in the style of an old-fashioned Linux startup and then hangs with a black screen (and sometimes a flashing cursor in the top left). On restarting, the system will still not boot from the SSD.
All of the important data on the SSD are backed up, so I could in principle just reformat the SSD and start again, but it would be very helpful if I could just allow it to boot and pick up where I left off without having to reconfigure everything from scratch again.
If anyone could suggest anything that might remedy this, I should be most grateful.
Bookmarks