HP Microserver boot issue - out of ideas

I am posting this here, as i know there are several users using the HP MIcroserver G8:

I was using my server happily for over 2 years, went trough several drive changes, etc., until this week. I got a SMART error on my system SSD, so decided to replace it. I have cloned the drive to a new SSD, booted up the new SSD on my desktop in a VM so if its working (passing trough the new SSD), and everything went fine until i put it back into the microserver.

At the same time I have performed a BIOS reset on the Microserver, as iLO was complaining about flash memory degradation. Since then, i am not able to force the server to boot from the SSD.

I have used this guide to set up a RAID 0 volume with the SSD only, as AFAIK its needed to boot from the ODD bay - i had the same setup before resetting the BIOS, so it definitely *SHOULD* work. Except it doesn't.

I know I could switch the controller to AHCI mode and install the bootloader to an internal USB or SD card, but previously i had performance issues with AHCI mode that were solved by switching to the internal RAID controller.

Any ideas are welcome, I am realizing living without my NAS is harder than i thought...

i did clone the SSD via Clonezilla and also booted from the cloned SSD on a different computer to test everything went correctly. also on the microserver booting up the Proxmox install disk and entering rescue mode boots up the system on the SSD without issues. actually i might use this to boot up my system everytime, since the system is likely to stay on until the next HW replacement (my last uptime was above 250 days).

in AHCI mode i had huge IO delays when backing up or snapshotting VMs - confirmed with different disks, so its controller related - i posted about the issue on the proxmox forums https://forum.proxmox.com/thre…re-jobs.74771/post-339132 where another user confirmed it as well.

also AHCI mode won't help with booting, as it's well known that the HP Microserver cant boot from the ODD port (where my SSD is placed) in AHCI mode, so only way is to use the internal "fake" RAID controller.

edit: since i managed to boot up proxmox via the install cd i have installed grub on the internal USB stick, booting up the SSD. so i can start the system, but still its not booting from the SSD. but at least it works now