Some thoughts come to mind with this issue of "no drives visible". Some of the following may be relevant, some not, so it may or may not be useful.
First check the BIOS/UEFI. If the disk can't be seen from displays in the BIOS/UEFI, then it can't load the bootloader.
If the hard drive is not seen in the BIO/UEFI, check the hardware connections in the machine.
If, as mentioned in post #1, a number of known-to-work hard drives were all invisible, what were they invisible to? Was it the BIOS/UEFI? Or was it when simply booting the machine?
If the BIOS/UEFI can see the disks, but the booting cannot, then there may be a menu item in the BIOS/UEFI that needs to be altered. Some BIOS/UEFIs have a menu selection somewhere in them which differentiates between an MS operating system, and others which it may refer to as Legacy, or Unix, or Other etc. If there's an item like that, it needs to be changed away from MS.
As well as fastboot being disabled, it's best to disable secure boot as well to simplify matters.
Was the usb used for installation verified by the checksum? One needs to have some certainty that the installation media is valid.
Is the distro installing in BIOS mode or EFI mode? EFI mode needs a small partition of its own with a filesystem which is usually fat32, and using GPT partitioning.
If the BIOS/UEFI does see the hard disk then there may be bootloader issues. You can check whether there is actually an installed system on the hard drive, including all partitions. You can run the live usb, mount the hard drive, navigate to the mount point and inspect the filesystem. If the loaded installation is there, you may be able to avoid a re-installation. It may rather be a matter of installing or re-installing the grub bootloader, which can be done from the live usb disk. Here's a link providing an example of using the live disk in "troubleshoot" mode to re-install the bootloader for RHEL, which should be adaptable to Rocky:
This guide explains how to recover a corrupted GRUB 2 Bootloader in Red Hat (RHEL) 8 system using the Anaconda Rescue Mode from installation DVD/ISO.
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