ASUS K55A boot loader / BIOS issue

[RenegadePC]

Hi, I recently acquired an ivy i5 ASUS K55A with corrupted BIOS (as is all over Google) so I ordered a new BIOS chip and broke out the reflow gun, desoldered, desoldered switched on and everything worked fine. Naturally the first thing I did was install OS X using Clover (always booting from USB). Got everything working, battery, graphics, backlight, audio, WiFi SSDT etc (always booting from USB).

 

After I got everything running properly with DSDT patches I installed Clover to ESP in UEFI mode, copied everything over to Clover and restarted.. POST and..... Nothing.

Checked BIOS settings, all good. 

Removed HDD from SATA and plugged it in via SATA to USB adaptor and started up the machine, booted into Clover then booted to OS X no problems.

Checked BIOS settings again to be triple sure, put the HDD back in the laptop, turned it on and..... Nothing, no boot loader. 

 

At this point I decided to try Legacy boot, tried ESP legacy, same problem, POST ok, waited to see Clover menu.......... Nothing

The tried installing Clover legacy not in ESP, not sure of exactly what settings I need but had a play..... Nothing

 

From here I decided to try a drive formatted entirely as FAT 32 and installed Clover to that and got as far as init5 and it hung at that point.

I then tried Chimera and Chameleon and yet again, boot0 or boot ss0 but other than that....  nothing!! 

 

There are no options in this BIOS to enable/disable secure boot, legacy/UEFI boot, only legacy USB support.

I also tried copying Windows boot loader files to the FAT 32 formatted drive and the BIOS picked it up right away!

 

The only way I can get this machine to see the boot loader is to use a USB stick or plug the HDD in USB via an adaptor.

 

So, if anyone is still reading this, do you have any idea of how I can get this to boot from the internal SATA please?

 

PS. I also tested the HDD with Clover (installed to for UEFI) on a HP ProBook and the boot loader is correctly installed.   

 

Thanks for reading.