Question Gigabyte h270-hd3 boot sector issues

[shagrock]

trying to scavenge old parts to make a donation computer for a friend's kid. Have an old Gigabyte h270-hd3, an old WD Green 500GB and an old Samsung EVO 870 1TB. I tried for a while to get the EVO to install and boot and couldn't get it working. Got the WD to format and install without issues, except after rebooting there was no boot sector found. After messing with it for a while (firmware updates, bios updates, etc.) I have the following situation:

in the Bios there are only the two disks showing, both are showing as boot options, neither will boot by default. However, if I go into the boot options (f12) on each reboot, there is a node device that has no name (blank list object at the top of the list) selecting this blank list item in the boot options menu results in successfully booting into the windows install on the WD. I cannot however get the bios to display this object in the bios as a default boot option. I've been building and maintaining computers for over 30 years and I've never seen anything quite like it. Yes, I have tried to reset the bios, etc. Nothing has worked. Not sure what to do.

 

[CountMike]

trying to scavenge old parts to make a donation computer for a friend's kid. Have an old Gigabyte h270-hd3, an old WD Green 500GB and an old Samsung EVO 870 1TB. I tried for a while to get the EVO to install and boot and couldn't get it working. Got the WD to format and install without issues, except after rebooting there was no boot sector found. After messing with it for a while (firmware updates, bios updates, etc.) I have the following situation:

in the Bios there are only the two disks showing, both are showing as boot options, neither will boot by default. However, if I go into the boot options (f12) on each reboot, there is a node device that has no name (blank list object at the top of the list) selecting this blank list item in the boot options menu results in successfully booting into the windows install on the WD. I cannot however get the bios to display this object in the bios as a default boot option. I've been building and maintaining computers for over 30 years and I've never seen anything quite like it. Yes, I have tried to reset the bios, etc. Nothing has worked. Not sure what to do.

Did you try with Samsung only ? I would clean it out of all partitions and try as raw or just one formatted partition.

 

[shagrock]

Yes I tried that, The real thing I'm trying to figure out is how is the boot sector on the WD drive not accessible to the BIOS (therefor cannot be default boot device) but is available (with an empty name) in the boot options menu. I'm not sure how that's possible.

 

[CountMike]

Yes I tried that, The real thing I'm trying to figure out is how is the boot sector on the WD drive not accessible to the BIOS (therefor cannot be default boot device) but is available (with an empty name) in the boot options menu. I'm not sure how that's possible.

Yes I tried that, The real thing I'm trying to figure out is how is the boot sector on the WD drive not accessible to the BIOS (therefor cannot be default boot device) but is available (with an empty name) in the boot options menu. I'm not sure how that's possible.

If you installed windows on new drive while old one was present, it's possible that boost sector is on old drive and actual boot is on new drive.
Can you link a picture of Disk management ?

 

[shagrock]

nah, the boot sector was not on the wrong drive. It is there, just not addressable as a default boot device. Instead It's basically hidden, I have to go into the manual boot options on every boot and select the no-named boot device from that menu then it boots just fine, every single time. Was just curious wtf would cause a boot sector to be in this state (essentially hidden from bios but still bootable from 'pick a device to boot from' during bootup). Like is the Bios recognizing sectors by an Indexed ID and this somehow doesn't have one?