Tuesday, December 24, 2019

windows 8 - Can't access BIOS and can't boot from USB when HDD is plugged in

I have a Samsung Ultrabook series 5 notebook (NP530U3C), and recently I've been tinkering with Linux distros. I've had a dualboot setup with Windows 8 and Linux on this computer before, and all went good until I installed Crunchbang.



After rebooting from the installation the Grub menu with Fedora (the previous distro, whose partition had since been occupied with Crunch) and Windows showed up. I went into the BIOS and changed the boot mode from UEFI to CSM (which I believe to be some sort of legacy mode). This allowed a different Grub menu with Crunchbang and Windows 8 to show up; however this was still not an optimal situation since Windows would not boot from this Grub menu (it did boot from the old "Fedora Grub"). Of course, I wanted a way to have both OSes boot from the same menu, and after some searching I came across and followed this tutorial: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=21510



I must have screwed up, though, because at that point whenever I tried to access the BIOS again (F2 key), it would go straight to Grub. To make thing even worse, I believe the USB drive wasn't higher than the HDD/Windows bootloader in the boot device order at the time I lost access to the BIOS.



At last, I thought that deleting the Crunchbang and EFI partitions would allow me to break from this situation where I could neither boot from a USB drive not enter the BIOS to change the option that would allow me to. To delete them I put the HDD in another, older laptop and booted from a Gparted live USB.




As of now, when I boot the notebook with the HDD plugged in, I am redirected to a Grub-rescue terminal. If I turn the PC on without the HDD, I can boot from live USB drives, but so far I have not had success in hotplugging and having the live system recognize the HDD.



To sum this all up:
Can't access BIOS, no EFI partition, no Linux system.



Booting with HDD -> Can't boot from USB, cannot boot Windows 8, Grub-rescue prompt.



Booting without HDD -> Can boot live USBs.




If it is of any help, I can access the Windows recovery menu; however, I didn't have any luck solving my problem using it.



Thanks in advance.

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