Question bios recognizes m2 after shutdown but not after restart

[answeringmachine]

Hello guys. I've recently bought a pre-built rig, when it arrived I installed the gpu and booted up. Everything was perfect except windows 10 was the home edition, I had a usb with windows 10 that I've installed with rufus so I thought it's easier to just reinstall. I did that and again there was no problem. But I've realized I could see the partition that windows created on my m2, I've looked up online on how to hide it and I did it. I installed all the windows updates and moved on with my day.

Couple of days later I remembered that I forgot to turn resize bar on. I got into bios and enabled it, doing this also enabled above 4g coding and -if I remember correctly- csm. Booted up fine. I installed my gpu driver, and when I restarted pc went straight into bios, I pressed save and exit without changing anything but it went into bios again. I pushed reset button, same. I turned it off completely and on again, but this time it booted up fine. This is the point I've realized I could turn the pc off and on but if I reset it it was going into a bios loop. I've never really needed to restart until installing the gpu driver so I don't know at what point I screwed up.

Here's the stupid thing I did though, I thought I could just reinstall windows 10 again to fix it. I did a custom installation, formatted the m2 and started installing. I went to kitchen and when I came back I saw it was back in bios. I started it again and this time there was no drive to install windows at all, I've looked it up main solution to this was installing the motherboards storage driver. So I downloaded my models driver, put it in the windows 10 usb. I tried installing the driver but any of the folders wasn't showing up unless I unchecked "show only compatible drivers". I installed them one by one anyway, but it didn't solve the issue.

Now if I boot the pc into bios I can see the m2 with windows installed on it, if I reinstall windows at the end it says windows has to restart and it goes back into bios, and because it restarted I don't see the m2 anymore, only the usb.

I've tried turning csm on and off, switching between windows uefi and other os, resetting back to default bios settings. I don't know if I screwed something while trying to hide the partition, or if I need to fix it through bios. Any idea how to fix it?

Much thanks in advance.

 

[Colif]

I don't know if I screwed something while trying to hide the partition

thats the first time you mention that?

Now if I boot the pc into bios I can see the m2 with windows installed on it, if I reinstall windows at the end it says windows has to restart and it goes back into bios, and because it restarted I don't see the m2 anymore, only the usb.

windows install is confused, only real answer to it is wipe nvme and start again.

what motherboard do you have?
what are you doing to get it to boot off USB? did you change boot order?

the first restart after a reinstall isn't running off the nvme, it should be running off the USB. it doesn't use nvme for a few starts.

csm was probably reason it didn't boot after you turned on resizzable bar. I wasn't aware it would swap boot method just turning that on. If you had swapped back to UEFI boot then it might have come good.

I've tried turning csm on and off, switching between windows uefi and other os, resetting back to default bios settings.

You want it on Windows UEFI
a little late for that now.

 

[answeringmachine]

thats the first time you mention that?


windows install is confused, only real answer to it is wipe nvme and start again.

what motherboard do you have?
what are you doing to get it to boot off USB? did you change boot order?

the first restart after a reinstall isn't running off the nvme, it should be running off the USB. it doesn't use nvme for a few starts.

csm was probably reason it didn't boot after you turned on resizzable bar. I wasn't aware it would swap boot method just turning that on. If you had swapped back to UEFI boot then it might have come good.


You want it on Windows UEFI
a little late for that now.

First of all thank you for taking your time to help.
Sorry... I know that there are probably a lot of things that I did to make it worse but this is the first time I'm fiddling around with bios settings, and I was inpatient through the process. There is an improvement though:

I've realized that I'm able to boot into windows when I remove the usb drive. But if I reset or restart the computer bios still doesn't recognize the m2.

I can still wipe the nvme, I don't have any personal files on it, but I don't know how to do it. I thought about this too but I wasn't sure if my nvme was compatible with asus safe erase. I couldn't find the list on the internet.

Motherboard is Asus Prime B550m-k.

I've never touched the boot order, I've just booted through clicking the usb or the windows boot manager in the boot menu. But the boot order was always the usb first, the windows boot loader later after shutdown. only the usb after reset. - nothing if I unplugged the usb after restart-

Now that I'm able to get to desktop, can I fix the nvme?

 

[SkyNetRising]

1st - going from windows 10 Home to Pro doesn't require reinstall. You just upgrade windows key and that's it.

2nd - changing boot mode settings (CSM on, off) probably messed things up. You don't change boot mode settings after windows is installed.

3rd - to clean drive, you boot from windows install media into command prompt and use diskpart.

diskpart​

list disk​

select disk 0​

(if you have multiple disks connected, then make sure, you select the right disk)​

clean​

That's it. The disk is clean. No partitions, no data. Nothing.