[Solved] BIOS can's see any bootloaders after changing Hackintosh case

[waterwheels]

Hello, I'm having a strange problem. I moved all my computer's guts to a new case today, and I kept track of where everything was plugged in, including using the same SATA ports and usb headers and such. When I tried to start it up though it went to the "no compatible boot devices" screen. In the BIOS there's no entry for the Clover bootloader, though one time there was a windows bootloader on the macOS SSD where clover should be. There are entries for the physical disks, but only by their disk names, like not "clover efi on samsung mz....." just the latter part.
Right now I've got my macOS SSD out and backing up before I run disk repair on it via the terminal (disk utility would say I needed to be in the recovery partition even when I was). I can't work out what could have happened in the change over, but I've noticed while using the SATA to USB adapter that the connection on my SSD sometimes drops out, so it's possible it was damaged?

any tips on what I can troubleshoot would be much appreciated

 

[Gen_]

My first thought is that you may have an offset problem. This has occurred to me before in your situation, with a mobo that slightly warped to match my Cooler Master Storm Scout case. It and your case warp together due to heat and soft metal casing, then when you swap to a new case, your solder spots on the back of the mobo are touching the case. Try unmounting it, sticking a sheet of paper to the back of the case with tape and remounting it to be sure that you're not accidentally grounding a SATA controller trace or something.

If it is this then your mobo running hot may eventually scald the paper enough to reintroduce the problem, get something more long term like PCB conformal coating ($5) to insulate the back of your mobo, though expect a slight temp increase.

My second thought is that you have set legacy MBR boot mode in BIOS somehow, as that would remove as much info.. maybe you touched the cmos pins and reset your BIOS. It doesn't explain everything like the first thought though.

 

[waterwheels]

My first thought is that you may have an offset problem. This has occurred to me before in your situation, with a mobo that slightly warped to match my Cooler Master Storm Scout case. It and your case warp together due to heat and soft metal casing, then when you swap to a new case, your solder spots on the back of the mobo are touching the case. Try unmounting it, sticking a sheet of paper to the back of the case with tape and remounting it to be sure that you're not accidentally grounding a SATA controller trace or something.

If it is this then your mobo running hot may eventually scald the paper enough to reintroduce the problem, get something more long term like PCB conformal coating ($5) to insulate the back of your mobo, though expect a slight temp increase.

My second thought is that you have set legacy MBR boot mode in BIOS somehow, as that would remove as much info.. maybe you touched the cmos pins and reset your BIOS. It doesn't explain everything like the first thought though.

That's an interesting thought, but I worked out what the problem was.
At some point during the move (or maybe even before it) the partition map on the SSD with the Clover EFI was damaged, and was too large. This meant the bios couldn't tell that the Clover bootloader was there.
The solution was to repair the disk, but disk utility wouldn't do it, saying I needed to be booted in recovery (on the laptop I was using for repair) even when I was. In the end I had to back up the HD and use the diskUtil commands in terminal to force it and it works fine.