Solved Dodgy BIOS

Here's a thing, while fiddling with my new build & trying to understand why the box will run OK from the boot menu but lock otherwise I noticed this:

BIOS cannot figure out which port is correct. I've contacted Gigabyte support.

good luck man!

MrPig said:

Here's a thing, while fiddling with my new build & trying to understand why the box will run OK from the boot menu but lock otherwise I noticed this:

BIOS cannot figure out which port is correct. I've contacted Gigabyte support.

View attachment 101860

Click to expand...

Try pulling the mains lead and then the BIOS battery for a minute then refit and power up to test.

Rollback_Jockey said:

Try pulling the mains lead and then the BIOS battery for a minute then refit and power up to test.

Click to expand...

Tried that.

So, if I let the PC boot as normal when it gets to the Windows load screen the wheel of doom turns 90° & freezes.
Press F10 & into the boot menu & it boots as normal. Methinks the BIOS is sending itself to the wrong drive.

just a thought, if your system can .. have you tried disabling all the boot options. save settings and restart.
it also maybe an idea to re-set TPM as well. see if the system then picks up the correct drive.

then go back and enable the boot options one at a time.
then see what the results are.

hope this is of help, best of luck. Steve ..

Tried that Steve.

Don't have TPM & I disabled all the other boot options

the one other thing i can advise is to re-flash the BIOS.
but with that comes risks and not sure if you have already tried that.

after that and it still persists then it could very well be a corrupt EFI/MBR.

not much help im afraid, best of luck. Steve ..

Re-flashed the BIOS & still the same.

As I have suggested on another thread, by default BIOS sees the first SATA port or NVMe slot when looking for a bootable device. I always make sure the Windows disk is connected to the FIRST one and any other disk or DVD on the others. That ensures even if the BIOS battery fails and resets to defaults that I will always be able to boot in Windows. Even back in the IDE (ATAPI) days, I always made sure the Windows hard disk was Primary Master (the first in order). Not Secondary Master and of course never Slave (second in order). This eliminates many incompatibilities. Similarly in modern computers the hard disk is always in SATA 0 etc. In your case make sure the Windows NVMe disk is connected to the first slot and the other disk on the other slot. Then reset BIOS to default and carefully reconfigure it if necessary. Go to the Boot section and confirm that the Windows NVMe disk is FIRST in the list of bootable devices. If you don't need other boot devices, disable them all, leave only the Windows disk. You can load BIOS and enable any other device only when you need it.

PS: Some may claim that modern Windows like 10 and 11 don't require this and can boot from any port/slot. Yes, probably, but it doesn't harm to make it easy for them by connecting the Windows disk on the first port/slot, especially if you have more than one disks on your computer.

only have one boot device installed.. or connected... let the machine build a MBR with only one storage device with boot. After you are sure it is good, you can reconnect more storage devices.

There is a slight issue... As far as I know most BIOS won't boot an NVMe device if it is MBR (Legacy mode). They require GPT (UEFI mode). So let only one device and clean install Windows in UEFI mode.

NVMe is GPT.

MrPig said:

NVMe is GPT.

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Nope - you can format a drive as MBR or GPT but you can only use it as a data drive not OS drive in most cases afaik.

Yes, I tried once to install Windows 11 in Legacy BIOS mode (MBR) on purpose to avoid the small system partitions created in GPT because the drive had small capacity. So I set it to MBR mode, created a single NTFS partition and tried to install Windows. Setup would not let me proceed stating that I would not be able to boot it. So I converted it to GPT and Setup proceeded without further complain. This is true for NVMe SSDs. I am not sure if that also applies to M.2 SSDs. Thankfully in SATA disks you can do either a Legacy BIOS (MBR) or UEFI (GPT) installation, so in as small as 120GB disks you don't waste any space with the system partitions.