Can't boot notebook from SSD

[MR ZenWiz]

On Sat, May 20, 2017 at 12:21 PM, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> No joy.  It still comes up in BusyBox after timing out on the boot.
> Problem is now, even with quiet deleted and nosplash in Grub, I can't
> see what happened, though I suspect it's the same problem - it can't
> find the boot drive by UUID.  It shows the Xubuntu 16.04 "text" in the
> middle of the screen with the flashing dot sequence, then drops into
> BusyBox with no output as to why.
>
> I'm ready to give up on it and just live with the slow hard drive,
> though it really seems pathetic.  I can't even use the SSD anywhere
> else - no other computers that need it.  Hope I can sell it....

I disabled UEFI boot and this time it came up and showed me the
sequence again before dropping into BusyBox.  Same issue - it can't
find the drive.  I did a cat /proc/modules and that was emtpy.  ls
/dev shows too much for the screen, but one thing missing is anything
under /dev/sd* - there are no disks, including the hard drive that the
boot PROM recognized (but ignored as a boot device, as instructed).

It does mention something about missing modules, but not which.  Is
there a module I need to boot from an SSD that's not part of the
distro?  That might explain it.  If so, how do I get and install it
into the boot image?

Thanks.