Fedora 39 boot configuration to start directly from the hard disk without depending on the USB

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The next step is to go into your BIOS setup and find the setting for boot mode, where it is currently set to some kind of "CSM’ or ‘auto’ or ‘mixed’ or something else that means decide automatically between legacy and UEFI. Switch it to another mode which may be called UEFI or EFI or something else but with a description you can associate with EFI. Either “UEFI” or “EFI” mean the same thing in the context of a boot mode.

Jeff suggested your BIOS boot menu may offer choice between booting the USB in legacy mode vs. UEFI mode. If it does, you can use that to get it booted in UEFI mode (especially if you can’t find the option in BIOS settings, which I’m confident is there but may not use exactly the words I described).

After that, you can reboot your USB in EFI mode. Then that command
ls /sys/firmware/efi
will verify you are in efi mode.

Once you know you are EFI mode, you can redo the Fedora install and we expect it to work better this time.

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That confirms that your USB was created for legacy BIOS boot aka CSM.
See https://rufus.ie/pics/screenshot1_en.png under “Target system” where you select BIOS boot or UEFI boot.

The gparted is not included in the Workstation version, but you can use disks instead. You can also run sudo install gparted.

From your boot list, did you try to select to boot from Hard Drive or SATA0?

Arrival Boot Sources
USB Floppy/CD
Hard Drive
SATA0
Generic Flash Disk 8.07
ATAPI CD/DVD Drive
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So far as I can tell from everything in this thread, we still don’t know why the legacy install of Fedora on the SATA didn’t boot. It is likely more productive to ignore that and focus on getting the USB booted in UEFI mode, so it will install Fedora in UEFI mode.

BUT, that SATA0 quoted from the BIOS list might be the hint. Maybe the BIOS (by hard coding or by current configuration) boots legacy SATA only from SATA0 (while it may have booted a UEFI install of Windows from a different SATA).

I don’t see anything in this thread which says which SATA connector the SSD is connected to. That rarely matters. But maybe in this obscure situation it did matter. I doubt that it is connected to SATA0.

I think you can get that info from
dmesg | grep 'SATA link'

But those are numbered 1 to N rather than the BIOS numbering, which may be 0 to N-1. So “SATA0” would be reported as “ata1” in that output.