Solution: So using DBAN to wipe an external disk corrupted/wiped my EFI partition on my main SSD drive. The solution for this problem was that I followed the steps from How can I repair grub? (How to get Ubuntu back after installing Windows?) as suggested by Karsus (thank you!) noting that sda1 was formatted fat32 and flagged boot but did not show as efi (as demonstrated in https://askubuntu.com/a/764702/13398).

Original post:

So I’m going to give you quick story and I’ll get into details. I have Ubuntu installed on my laptop and have been using it for quite some time. Yesterday I needed to wipe a drive so I booted my laptop via a USB drive that had the Ultimate Boot Cd and ran Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) of the external drive. When I rebooted the laptop failed to boot. I get an error: “PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable”

So details: OS: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Laptop: Toshiba Satellite P50-B Hd: PNY Optima Series 240GB SSD (SSD7SC240GOPT-RB) UBCD: 1.9.5.7 – DBAN ?

I booted an ubuntu usb boot image and looked at the drive with gparted. The three partitions are still there: boot sector, data, and linux swap. Furthermore all my data is still there as well (and now backed up). So I’m guessing somehow the boot sector got corrupted? Is there a simple way to fix this or is it just time to install 16.04 and call it a day?

Ok, Thank you Karsus, you reminded me of a comment I forgot to make. In order to run the usb boots I had to switch from UEFI boot to CSM boot. I also switched the boot order but have reverted that. I only get the PXE-E61 error in CSM mode. In UEFI mode I simply get "Reboot and select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key". ?