Since a recent update, my desktop has quit booting. I just says “Loading kernel,” with kernel number, and does nothing else. What’s worse is that I can’t even boot it from an external drive that I boot a Windows laptop with when I want to run Linux on it. The desktop doesn’t even recognize it as boot media, though it continues to work fine with the laptop.

[Sunday-afternoon update]

Patricia’s Windows 10 machine is the same MSI motherboard as mine, and I confirmed that it, too, does not recognize the external drive as bootable. I went back into Windows, and created a live-USB for Fedora, which did boot into both her machine and mine.

So, I decided to just create a new installation. I put it on a spare Samsung 250G SSD that I had. It has no problem installing it, but when I tried to boot from it, at first I couldn’t even see it in the boot menu in the BIOS. I changed from UEFI to CSM, at which point it appeared, and I made it the first boot. But when I tried to boot it, I got the same error message as when I tried to boot from the external drive. The machine continues to not recognize a Fedora boot disk as bootable.

[Bumped]

[Update Monday afternoon]

OK, after talking to MSI, I found out that I had been setting the boot order wrong, and finally got it working. I’m pretty much back to normal, except I need to clone the Samsung over to my M.2. If I didn’t keep /home on a separate drive, though, I’d be in a world of hurt.

[Bumped]