Installed W10 1511 fresh, won't boot after multiple reinstalls (from any drive)

[Hail The Brain Slug]

As title states, I had issues with some programs after the update to 1511, so I downloaded the image to do a fresh install of 1511 directly. I made a bootable USB drive, made a new partition on my SSD, and did the install. After the first reboot (and now the first boot into W10) it blue screened. After that, it would not boot and instead go directly to the UEFI.

I've tried remaking the USB drive and reinstalling 1511, installing W10 original from my old DVD, and even installing W10 onto a different drive and now my system will not boot from any drive, no matter what I do.

I made no changes in the UEFI between having a working W10 and starting this.

System specs:
5960x
Asus X99-A/USB3.1
32GB Corsair DDR4 3000
Samsung 950 PRO 512gb

WTF do I do now?

Edit: My current issue is now that as soon as I plug any drive besides the boot drive in, my system will boot directly to the UEFI and does not boot into windows. This was definitely 100% not an issue before I attempted to clean install Windows 10 1511. It doesn't make any sense, though, unless the windows boot manager is borked for 1511

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

Urgh, for whatever reason unplugging every drive in my system except the 950, deleting all the partitions and installing W10 1511 worked. I just hope it still works when I plug the other drives back in.

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

Aaaaaaaaaaaand as soon as I install any other drives, it breaks again.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Clear CMOS / Reset the UEFI? (My Gigabyte H81M-DS2V boards, the "Clear CMOS" jumper, actually triggers a UEFI recovery mode that prompts to reset the settings, it doesn't actually reset them when you use the jumper.)

Sounds weird. It seems like it's either a UEFI problem, or a drive failure problem. (How many drives are we talking about here, besides the 950?) I assume the 950 Pro is an NVMe M.2 SSD? (Do they even make SATA6G 950 drives? I don't think so.)

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

Clear CMOS / Reset the UEFI? (My Gigabyte H81M-DS2V boards, the "Clear CMOS" jumper, actually triggers a UEFI recovery mode that prompts to reset the settings, it doesn't actually reset them when you use the jumper.)

Sounds weird. It seems like it's either a UEFI problem, or a drive failure problem. (How many drives are we talking about here, besides the 950?) I assume the 950 Pro is an NVMe M.2 SSD? (Do they even make SATA6G 950 drives? I don't think so.)

It is an M.2 PCI-e NVMe drive. I finally relented and did the CMOS reset jumper, which does reset the whole CMOS on my motherboard. Giving it a shot now to see what happens.

It's just been so strange, it's like it tries to boot from a drive that has no OS on it despite having boot priorities correct, or doing a force-boot from inside the UEFI. I had a 100% perfectly working install that just broke as soon as one other drive is plugged in.

Edit: I have 5 drives I had plugged in before attempting to reinstall that worked fine. I really only need 3 of them, but just plugging in one breaks it.

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

Well, I found the fix. For no apparent reason the CSM (Compatibility Support Module) decided to get in the way. Everything was broken one second, and when I disabled it in the UEFI, everything magically worked.

It's very odd, the CSM has been enabled and on the same default settings since I build the system last week, and I've installed W10 twice with no issue until today.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not sure if disabling the CSM fixed the problem, or is just preventing it from happening. It removes all boot devices except the Windows Boot Manager, so there's not really any way for it to boot the wrong drive...

 

[PliotronX]

Well, I found the fix. For no apparent reason the CSM (Compatibility Support Module) decided to get in the way. Everything was broken one second, and when I disabled it in the UEFI, everything magically worked.

It's very odd, the CSM has been enabled and on the same default settings since I build the system last week, and I've installed W10 twice with no issue until today.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not sure if disabling the CSM fixed the problem, or is just preventing it from happening. It removes all boot devices except the Windows Boot Manager, so there's not really any way for it to boot the wrong drive...

That was likely it; CSM is a bit of a nebulous misnomer, it should actually be called "Windows 7 support module" or plain "legacy support module." It is for legacy support w/MBR:

In this scenario, booting is performed in the same way as on legacy BIOS-based systems, by ignoring the partition table and relying on the content of a boot sector.

 

[xpender]

I had the same problem after I installed my second SSD drive (with a total of 5 drives). Windows would not boot telling to install a boot drive. After amny attempts to boot, going to BIOS and making sure every time the boot drive was selected first, it finally booted up. I don't think i did anything. So I tried again by removing the second SSD drive, booting up , shutting down, installing the SSD drive again and .... no boot. I t just does not make sense. I blamed the SSD drive. So I got a new one, and same problem happened. Then I was thinking that maybe the mobo was too old (Asus Formula III), but getting a new one for my newer rig, did the same thing. So I gave up on the idea to get that working. By the way it was 2 Mushkin Deluxe SSD 240 GB.

 

[pigsty]

I'd like to know if any of the hard drives being used had any Windows bootloader partitions on them; if so, I suspect that those bootloaders are causing the problems described here. IIRC, those partitions are hidden, so if you don't remove them, you could easily have conflicts on bootup. Just my 3 cents...

 

[Puffnstuff]

Yep if there's more than one boot partition available it will confuse the bios. You might want to try wiping the additional drives prior to connecting them to the mb. On my original clean install of 10 somehow things became confused and I ended up with more than one bootloader which started causing problems for me until I discovered it and cleared it off the drive. This is also a good reason to only install windows with the boot drive attached to the system. That insures that the bootloader and all associated windows files go to the correct drive.

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

I'd like to know if any of the hard drives being used had any Windows bootloader partitions on them; if so, I suspect that those bootloaders are causing the problems described here. IIRC, those partitions are hidden, so if you don't remove them, you could easily have conflicts on bootup. Just my 3 cents...

All drives besides the main drive I was attempting to install on have a single partition listed in disk management, but some have been used as boot drives before. Are those partitions hidden from disk management?

It would not boot even when I connected only my storage RAID that has never had an OS installed on it.