Question Gigabyte z590 Aorus Ultra in BIOS loop...No boot drive detected...

[JWMiddleton]

I bought a used Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Ultra MB off Ebay to use with an i9-10850K that was replaced under warranty. I bought new RAM and M.2 SSD. I installed Win 11 and all was great for 5 days UNTIL I started messing with the BIOS based on Jayz2Cents' tip to get the CPU to run cooler.

In BIOS "Easy Mode" it shows "no bootable devices found" under "Boot sequence". But my drives are visible under the SATA and M.2 tabs. So, it is not seeing my 2TB M.2 boot drive. I've load Optimized Defaults (F7) a few times and I've cleared BIOS. I made sure Secure Boot is Enabled.

After starting this post I tried inserting the Win 11 USB stick that I used for installation and it booted into Windows Setup.

UPDATE: Since I got it to boot with the USB stick, I wanted to see what it showed for the drives. It has the 2TB M.2 as Unallocated Space. Not a good sign!

Any ideas?

 

[JWMiddleton]

I connected an old Samsung 840 Pro SATA SSD that had Win 10 on it and it booted. So, it points to the brand new M.2 drive being bad. I guess the next step is to remove the M.2 drive and see if I can see it while installed in a USB enclosure. Since I've only just installed the drive with a fresh install, I've got no data to lose, just a lot of time. I need to be sure it isn't the MB.

 

[Tech Junky]

Fist thing comes to mind is RST / raid being set whenever you update the UEFI and if it wasn't setup with it enabled originally it won't show as a boot drive until you disable it.

Next is check the M2 in a different setup just to see if it's the drive or the system.

With it showing up in Setup as available to be used though it might be something simple as GPT v MBR. There's always a bunch of little things you have to check w/ Windows installs and it's a PITA if you don't do it often enough to recall all the little things that have to be done.

I switched back to AMD a couple of months ago and that's a whole different rat's nest to deal with but, UEFI updates are less BS to deal with. There are some quirks though on both sides.

 

[JWMiddleton]

We are leaving in the morning for to drive to Florida to catch a 7-Night cruise on Sunday. So, I decided to reinstall Win 11 on the M.2 drive and see what happens. I had saved all the installed downloads to a USB drive, so it was pretty easy to get back up and running. I'm on the system now. The M.2 drive has a 5-year warranty, and I don't have time to mess with a return right now. So, I'll let it run and see how it goes.

I did check to make sure the M.2 was set to GPT. Actually I deleted all the partitions and let Windows format and partition the drive.

 

[Tech Junky]

Windows format and partition the drive.

Easier than manual fixing and partitioning unless you want to squeeze the efi partition. The only caveat is the uefi has to be set or it will do mbr for the format. If you haven't tried ventoy for install manager it's worth looking into since you can drop multiple ISO files onto it instead of burning the image to the drive.

I have a feeling something just got done out of sequence or secure boot didn't allow it to be moved to the new mobo and boot because the keys didn't match.

 

[Shmee]

Another thing you could try is to check SMART or run extended tests of the m.2 drive under Linux or something. It's probably fine, and somehow the Windows just got screwed up.