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February 10th, 2025 13:16

Dell Vostro 3558 couldn't find the hard drive to boot from (eventhough BIOS still find the Windows partitionl

I'm having some really confusing problems here. I have 2 laptops, one HP ProBook 430 G2 and one Dell Vostro 3558. One day, I tried if I could take a RAM stick from my HP to put into the Dell. After I do it, the laptop still boots into Windows and Windows recognizes the additional amount of RAM that I had put in earlier. I tried to reboot a few more times and the laptop still boots normally. But later that day, I turned on the laptop and it couldn't find any of the 2 hard drives (one HDD with Windows 10 and one SSD with Windows 11 that was being installed into the place for the CD-ROM drive), both of them are booting from BIOS (Legacy) not UEFI. I tried to remove that RAM, stick, slap the SSD with Linux installed from my HP over, reset the BIOS using the 'Load default settings' button, remove the CMOS battery and put it back in. But nothing works. I had tried to put the HDD from the Dell to the HP and it still boots into Windows normally (I can't do the same with the SSD because it is not quite accessible). There is one thing that still makes me confused: when I select the UEFI boot option, try to find the UEFI boot file, the ENTIRE Windows partition still showing up in the BIOS, so it means that the BIOS still detects the hard drive. Additionally, when I tried to run onboard diagnostics, it didn't find any problem with anything, including the hard drive. The system information int the BIOS shows that the 'Primary Hard Drive' is {none} which it is HDD, and the 'ODD Device' is '120GB HDD.....' which is exactly the storage amount of my SSD (idk why does it say HDD). So what do I have to do now?

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February 10th, 2025 13:37

Hi

Quite a lot involved there.

I think you may have mixed up GPT/Secure boot partitioning and Legacy/MBR, but I could be wrong.

The BIOS would not normally show partitions.  Installed storage devices and Boot Managers referring to a Boot Loader Location.

So perhaps attempt to put things back the way they were and take one step at a time.

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