On 2020-10-22 12:53, Paul wrote:

Sometimes taking digital camera pictures of the BIOS screen in
advance, is a good enough method.

Some Asus motherboards are famous for their bad defaults choices in
the BIOS, requiring things to be corrected over and over again.

new battery

I do take pictures of the monitor when hot
onto something but for now I'm still poking
around in the dark and there seem to be multiple
issues involved

For starters i bought this DURGOD usb gaming keyboard
and 2 out of 10 boots I have to cycle it into another
usb port or I don't get to see BIOS with 'Del' nor get
to select anything from the frozen boot menu. Another
solution is to immediately plug in my old keyboard to
bypass this issue. I don't know if it's a keyboard
or a mobo fault.

Another problem might revolve around the sata
rack with mobile drawers for the drives. The last
dozen or so attempts I could not get any drive
plugged into the #4 slot detected. Suspecting the
drive that usually goes in there I plugged it in bybassing
the rack and then it got detected although I also
wondered if its 22,000 hours could be a factor.
When I initially posted this drive was taking a backup,
now recognised OK on a direct sata cable fdisk
showed it as a dos drive with no partition. Gdisk
showed the gpt table and the only partition but
on mounting it it was empty. When I plug this
drive into its usual #4 slot it doesn't get detected,
if I plug it into the #3 swapping with the one in there
then neither #3 nor #4 ger detected. A lot of this is
way over my head.

The boot drive is a brand new ssd and booting one
of the installations on it I got a filesystem error,
yet fsck from another installation proved it 'clean'.
This was a Suse-Leap partition, and subsequent
boots on it went without any problems.

So I'm like exhausted for right but will next connect
all drives directly bypassing the mobile tray setup
and using the old keyboard.

Later