Intel RSTe, Win 7 will not Boot

[jeessalu]

I recently re-installed Win 7, this was concurrent with a change to using the Intel RSTe RAID drivers. I used a flash drive to load the drivers while installing Windows, and now my computer will only turn on when the flash drive is inserted.

facts:

boot w/ flashdrive = starts normally
boot w/o flashdrive = get a no disk error after POST

The flashdrive contains drivers, so it only makes sense that this is the issue. However, the only one that I had to include during installation was the Inter RSTe v3 driver which I have subsequently re-installed after a successful Windows load. The computer works just fine as is, but I would like to remove the flash drive. I have looked at BIOS and tried to force a load of the boot drive, no luck. I am going to try to repair the MBR and run windows boot fix utility.

Board is an Asus P9x79 Deluxe.

 

[tomatthe]

It sure sounds like the boot record is on the flash drive somehow. Get Windows loaded and from Windows open an admin command prompt and type in

"bcdedit -enum" you should be able to see what partition is being used from the information that is listed there. I wouldn't suggest using the tool for anything other then that without researching its usage first. If that is the case you can use bcdedit to fix the issue, but it's not the most user friendly tool to work with.

 

[jeessalu]

Two things to add:

- the boot loader is on the correct partition, and I see the flashdrive nowhere on the bcdedit options
- when i look at the bootrec.exe options in system recovery, no OS is found

I am going to re-install/force load the drivers again, I would not like to have to re-format everything and am not sure if that would even fix this. How is the driver not getting into the system files? is it really reading the driver from the flash drive? the disk still works when i remove the flash drive after windows has loaded.

any help is appreciated. thanks,

 

[jeessalu]

I can confirm that this is a driver issue, I have replaced the flash drive with a spare and only copied the x64 drivers for Intel RSTe onto it and I can now get a successful boot with only that flash drive inserted.

So, now I have my flash drive back, and I have yet to see a performance loss once windows is loaded. POST takes a little longer, probably because I am using a older flash drive that is pretty slow, and this whole thing is a little weird, but it's an added layer of security...if I have that flash drive with me then no one can get my computer to turn on!