HP Pavilion 500-210 QE Can't boot from any hard drive.

Good Evening. As you can see from the subject, my computer just can't boot from any hard drive that I put on it. I tried swapping the power supply, the SATA cable, resetting the BIOS, enabling legacy boot, changing from AHCI to IDE and RAID...
When I get to the BIOS setup, I can see the hard drive and its specifications, but it just won't boot or show up when I'm trying to install a new OS. I'm not an expert, but I think the problem might be in the motherboard SATA ports, but I'm not sure. Just to make sure, I did try another hard drive and it didn't work aswell.
I was also thinking about buying an external hard drive and instaling my OS on that, but I don't even know if that's possible and I would really like to have my computer working again.
Thank you for your attention!
This question was solved.
View Solution.

What is the installed operating system?
Did you make a recovery disk set?
Did you happen to make a Windows 8.1 startup disk or USB recovery thumbdrive?
Have you tested the hard disk?
Press the power button and then immediately tap the Esc key. In the Startup menu, choose F2 for Diagnostics. In the HP Basic System Diagnostics menu choose hard disk. Run the test and post the results here.
The issue you are facing has nothing to do with the SATA ports. It is a configuration issue. Your PC is a modern one and its BIOS (UEFI) is far more advanced than what you may have seen before.
If you want to install a different operating system then you will have to make a few changes in the BIOS configuration. Secure Boot is turned on by default for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. If you try installing a different OS without turning this off then your system won't boot up. You may be running into this if you are trying to install another operating system.
The image below is what will be seen in the BIOS of your PC in the security tab --> . In the secure boot configuration options do not clear the secure boot keys! Those keys are your operating system license activation keys.
****Please click on Accept As Solution if a suggestion solves your problem. It helps others facing the same problem to find a solution easily****
2015 Microsoft MVP - Windows Experience Consumer

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I have MacBook Pro(late 2011) with OS X 10.7.5 and external hard drive with Ubuntu 13.04, from wich i can boot succefully on my PC. But MacBook Pro will not boot from my external drive, no matter which key/combination i use during restart.
After googling I found some answers to my initial question, how to boot from external hard drive
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1852633?start=0&tstart=0
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/faq/macbook-pro-boot-from-exte rnal-firewire-or-usb-drive.html
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1948
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here is info on my e-drive

LowLuster wrote:
The only OS that will boot from an external drive is Mac OS X or maybe Linux. For OS X to be installed on any drive it need to be formatted Mac OS Extended and have GUID partition table.
As for Linux I'm not that familiar with it but again for a Mac to boot it need an EFI partition on the drive and I don't think that is possible with NTFS or FAT32 let alone the native Linux format.
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Operating system loaders are a class of the UEFI applications. As such, they are stored as files on a file system that can be accessed by the firmware, called EFI System partition (ESP). Supported file systems include FAT32, FAT16 and FAT12, and supported partition table scheme is GPT only. UEFI does not rely on a boot sector, although ESP provides space for it as part of the backwards compatibility.[26]
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Can UEFI Secure Boot be adopted and implemented by a variety of operating systems?
UEFI specifications are platform-independent, supporting multiple platforms and architectures. In addition, UEFI specifications are designed to promote cross-functionality, as well as to support broad adoption across multiple operating systems, including Windows as well as Linux-based operating systems. The specifications are robust and can potentially complement—or even advance—other distributions, such as Linux-based distributions.
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