I have a system that refuses to boot to disk (or to boot to [defaulted] USB) without manual intervention. (It will not boot to disk at all.)
HISTORY - may be unimportant: This HP Proliant Microserver Gen 8 has been in my network for years, doing light-duty NAS services. Over time I've had a few difficulties with it. A few years ago, overnight, it refused to boot to the /dev/sde1 drive (UBUNTU 14.04LTS). After trying to reinstall, which I was unable to do - I don't remember why - I took the opportunity at that time to upgrade, making /dev/sdc1 the master using UBUNTU 18 and now UBUNTU 20.04. I kept /dev/scd1 mounted as /oldboot and occasionally borrowed things from there - especially /usr/local stuff. This has been status quo for a long time.
Overnight, about three weeks ago, this UBUNTU 20.04 system (as a few years ago) suddenly refused to boot to the designated drive (/dev/sdc1). And it will boot to USB only if I go through the steps to do so (F11=Boot menu, choose option 3: USB Key) even though BIOS is set to default to USB first. Instead, if no interaction it will eventually keep trying NIC boot over and over again. (Once it reaches that step, it will never try anything other than NIC no matter what I do. I suspect this is normal; the other issues mentioned here are not.)
Yesterday, I ran boot repair (output at https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/kZxgbpGk8X/), which seemed to imply that it had made the necessary corrections, but after running the process, the result is the same: No boot to disk. No boot to USB unless I intervene.
If it would solve the problem, I'd be happy to do NIC boot, but setup for that seems crazily involved, and I've found many "howto" sites / YT videos that seem to contradict one another, and not really one that will get me to a running, maintainable system. Maybe that's on me, but at this point I'm left with a system I can no longer use. (There's a 7+TB RAID drive on this system that's critical to me. It's backed up (in pieces) of course, but no place really that I can move it; I rely on this system and its mounted NAS drives.
Any help for getting this HP Proliant MicroServer Gen 8 to boot to /dev/sdc1 (or even /dev/sde1 and then an upgrade if it comes to that)? The pastebin output (https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/kZxgbpGk8X/) is gobbledygook to me, being unfamiliar with a successful process.
The BIOS, unfortunately, does not seem to have a drive selection option for boot. It does provide a choice of controllers only.
Thanks for any advice. And I'll be happy to provide other configuration information if requested.
