[SOLVED] Cannot boot on USB drive from ASUS TUF x570 GAMING PLUS

Fredass

Prominent
Oct 9, 2019
9
0
520
Hi, I just finished a new build and after 2 hours of reading and trying I am unable to boot from a USB drive to install windows 10 on my m.2 drive. Mother board is AUS TUF x570 GAMING plus. The system nevers sees the USB flash drive as a bootable device, i.e. there is no mention of it anywhere in the bios. The m.2 drive shows up fine.

I created the USB drive using this tutorial and it works fine on my other computer (I am able to boot in the windows installer):
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-...edia-uefi-support#create_windows10_uefi_rufus I even checked that the partition shows up as GPT in windows disk management.

I tried following the "Best Solution" procedure from this thread to the letter: https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/cant-install-windows-10-on-m-2.3082008/ . But step 7 boots to the bios as it does not seem to detect the drive or allow booting from it.

Noteworthy things that I noticed:
Turning on CSM does not make the USB drive show up (I know it needs to be off, I was just trying various options to see if I could at least see the flash drive)

One thing that bugs me is that the ASUS bios has an option to reboot to EFI shell in the exit menu. Trying to use this option yields this message:

"The Secure Boot is enabled to prevent untusted operating systems from
loading during the system start-up. To launch the EFI shell, please disable
the secure boot option."

However as you can see in step 4 of the procedure above, I did clear the keys and secure boot effectively shows up as disabled, but this message is still there so this might be related to my issue as secure boot is potentially not correctly disabled. I have tried restoring the key and removing them again, rebooting in between each step but the message is always there.

I also tried the USB drive in at least one of every USB port pairs.

I am out of ideas, please help me ! :)

A somewhat rant-ish side-question, why is it so hard to install windows on an m.2 drive, isn't it what anyone building a new system would try to do ? So many hoops to jump through.

Thanks!
 
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Solution
I found the problem although I don't fully understand it. I when into ASUS EZ flash just to see if I could see the USB drive, still didn't see it. At this point I tried another USB drive and the ASUS flash utility did see it.

I re-created my boot drive using this USB stick instead and now it works. As to why the other USB stick, which works both on my other PC and my laptop goes undetected by the ASUS board, I have no clue.

Fredass

Prominent
Oct 9, 2019
9
0
520
I found the problem although I don't fully understand it. I when into ASUS EZ flash just to see if I could see the USB drive, still didn't see it. At this point I tried another USB drive and the ASUS flash utility did see it.

I re-created my boot drive using this USB stick instead and now it works. As to why the other USB stick, which works both on my other PC and my laptop goes undetected by the ASUS board, I have no clue.
 
Solution
Sep 11, 2020
32
0
30
I figured out how to make it work on my tuf x570. It could boot for me with fat32 but not exfat. So i just formatted ntfs in the fast usb port by the ethernet and it recognized it as a bootup device finally, since win 10 iso is like 5gb right now.
 
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