[SOLVED] Cannot boot from USB GA-970A-UD3

Mar 9, 2021
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Hello there!

[Current Build]
I am at my wit's end with this computer... I had a build very similar to the above one running on the same hardware with windows 7 for years now. Recently I have upgraded some of the hardware and wanted to upgrade it to windows 10 for a friend of mine to use. After the hardware upgrade, there was some issue with the SSD, so I wiped all of it and instead tried booting the fresh operating system from a USB. To no avail. The computer recognizes the USB correctly, but when booting from it either gives a "non-system disk" error (now resolved with BIOS update) or gets stuck on the "loading operating system" screen indefinitely.

Here is what I have tried so far to get this to work:
  • formatting the USB (I had issues with this on a different PC, so already went through the whole process of figuring that out - have a working FAT32 Win10 version on the USB that I successfully installed on a different PC)
  • change boot sequence
  • turn SMART off in the bios menu
  • turn legacy systems option on in bios menu
  • update the BIOS to f8 (flashed successfully from USB)
  • try installing windows 7 instead (apparently there's an issue on this motherboard with large USBs, so I created a <4GB partition with win7 on it)
None of those seem to have resolved the issue as far as I can tell. If you have any other suggestions for what I might be able to do, please let me know!
 
Last edited:

Lutfij

Titan
Moderator
Your PCPartPicker link shows as a blank slate. You might want to parse the specs of your build. Did you create your bootable USB installer using Windows Media Creation Tools? You're advised to work with a 16GB pen drive for Windows 10's creation.
 
Mar 9, 2021
4
0
10
Hey! Sorry about that, I've updated the build now. I did not use the Media Creation Tool since all links to it that I found were no longer active. I did just format the drive to FAT32 manually, which worked on a different computer. But if you have a link to WMCT, I'll give it a shot.