Question Can't boot Windows 10 from SSD or reinstall after motherboard and CPU upgrade

[extrabit96]

Hi folks,

I just replaced my motherboard, CPU, and RAM with an ASRock AB350 Pro4, AMD Ryzen 7 2700, and Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 RAM. I also have a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card. I already had Windows 10 installed on an SSD.

After the replacement, I can get to BIOS settings and see whatever drives are plugged in in the boot devices list. If my DVD drive is connected, there are two options for it: one prefixed with "AHCI P1" and one with "UEFI." But there's only ever one option for my SSD, prefixed with "AHCI P0." Not sure if this is related to UEFI, but I think I had disabled everything UEFI-related on my previous build. In the new motherboard's BIOS settings, Secure Boot is disabled and CSM compatibility is enabled, and "Launch PXE OpROM Policy," "Launch Storage OpROM Policy," and Launch Video OpROM Policy" are all set to "Legacy only."

If I try to boot from the SSD on the new build I always just get the blinking white arrow in the upper left.

I am able to boot from a Windows 10 recovery DVD (if I select the UEFI listing for my DVD drive). But if I try to do "Reset this PC" (and "Keep my files"), I get the message "The drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again." (I'd prefer not to reinstall if at all possible, but I tried this anyway to see what would happen.)

If I hook everything back up to the old motherboard, I can boot Windows from the SSD.

Any ideas what's going on?

 

[jojesa]

Windows is trying to boot on the new system, and it is looking for the hardware in the previous installed system.

You might be able to get Windows to boot on the new system by removing all hardware connected to the old system (SATA AHCI controllers, GPU, CPU, Network, Sound, etc) from the Control Panel,
Also remove any software drivers.
Remove the disk from the old system and connected to the new system.
Also connect any other disk that were present when Window was installed.
Reset the BIOS to default settings and try booting again.

 

[extrabit96]

Thanks, I'll give that a try.

But I'm still especially perplexed by the "The drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again" message. I wonder if there's something that could be causing both issues. Besides, that's currently preventing me from doing a clean install if I have to resort to that.

 

[extrabit96]

I was able to solve this by issuing the command

bcdboot.exe D:\Windows /s C:

from the Windows recovery DVD command prompt. After that a new disk entry for the SSD appeared in the BIOS and I was able to boot from it.

It was ultimately the "locked" message that led me there. Googling that got me playing with bootrec as suggested here, and some error I got along the way led me to this answer on SuperUser. That's all it took! No reinstall necessary. Yay!

 

[jojesa]

Great!
Just removed the old hardware form the Control Panel to avoid further issues.