Help: Laptop not reading hard drive, replaced it... Still nothing

So, this one I can't for the life of me figure out.

Have an older Acer Aspire Laptop (around 5 yrs) that I love but recently it started giving me fits.

It's a dual boot Linux/windows with mechanical Sata HDD. A few weeks ago going whacky. Wouldn't boot anything and didn't even recognize there was an HDD there. So, whatever. I thought. It's old. I've dropped the laptop before, I probably screwed up the HDD.

Bought a SATA compatible SSD and installed it. Worked perfectly, but I lost my old windows pass key, so I decided just to full boot Ubuntu Linux on the pc.

Insterted USB load disk, Ubuntu pops up... Asks to install and I do. So, upon restart. Then the pc says "no. Bootable device."

I make sure the bios boots to the new SSD (which it knows is there) and still nothing. The pc won't boot to that hard drive even though it knows its there. It's so bizarre.
Tried booting in UEFI and Legacy... And nothing. Tried every conceivable combo of bootup options in tbe Bios... And nothing.

So, I took both hard drives, the new one and the old HDD, and plugged them into a USB-Sata adapter into another pc... And it won't read that either one of the are even there..

So, question is, is my motherboard frying these hard drives? Or is there something else? I can't figure it out for the life of me.