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A Lenovo tech came yesterday to replace the motherboard on my Thinkpad T440. I have Ubuntu 16.10 (or is it 16.04, can't remember) installed on a LUKS encrypted SSD. It was working fine before the motherboard replacement but now it won't boot. It won't even get to the GRUB screen.

I can mount the SSD on another Ubuntu computer and access my files so I know it's still there. The boot partition still exists as well but I'm not sure if it's somehow been damaged. I booted from an ubuntu livecd and tried running boot-repair but it didn't seem to have any effect.

When I turn on the computer it just keeps asking which drive I want to boot from, as if it can't find any bootloader or OS.

Any ideas? I have heaps of uni work on the SSD and although I've already backed up individual files there's no way for me to export data from my programs without booting it.

Please help!

cbx
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Sounds like your drive is ok but the laptop is not detecting it; possibly something went wrong with the mobo swap. Can you see during post or get in bios to see if the drive gets detected there? I'd try booting up another computer from the disk (usually works out-of-the-box) to make full backups.

kurja
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  • Yeah the computer sees the actual drive but doesn't seem to detect the boot partition. Ie. the drive is visible in the bios and the boot selection menu but when I actually try to boot from it the screen goes black for a second and then returns to the boot menu. Same thing occurs if I try to boot from the same drive in another computer – cbx Mar 28 '17 at 09:35
  • Hm. Could be wrong SATA mode - in BIOS, probably Config -> SATA -> Mode or something like that, you should find options AHCI or something else like "compatibility". or "IDE". You could change that to something that it's currently not and see if that helps. Can't really think of anything else :/ – kurja Mar 28 '17 at 13:58
  • one more thought - if it's the bootloader that has broken for some reason, it can be reinstalled by booting from live cd and running 'sudo grub-install /dev/sdX', sdX being your relevant drive. – kurja Mar 28 '17 at 14:05