Hello all, long time lurker first time poster.
I know this problem has been solved and outlined thousands of times in the past. However, I believe my problem is actually unique, you'll see why soon.
My problem is this, I recently upgraded my motherboard/CPU, and am unable to boot past the motherboard splash screen. Once the splash screen goes away, there is the dreaded blinking underscore in the top left indicating that it can't find a bootable operating system.
Here are my pre-upgrade specs:
AMD FX-6200
Radeon HD7850
Asus M5 A99X Evo
Toshiba 2TB HDD
Here's the kicker:
Highpoint RocketRAID 2720SGL SCSI Controller
2x 800GB SAS SSDs arranged in a JBOD with Windows 7 installed
Post-upgrade specs:
Intel Core i7 4790k
EVGA Z87 FTW
Everything else is the same
In the UEFI, I can see that my new CPU is recognized, my SATA HDD is recognized and my Highpoint controller is also recognized with information on all of them. In the boot order, I am able to select the Highpoint SAS card, the Toshiba HDD, the USB drive I made and the CD/DVD with Windows on it. However, I am unable to boot from any except the CD/DVD ONLY when I use UEFI mode, so that means that a regular non-UEFI CD/DVD boot is impossible at this time.
Using UEFI mode to boot from the windows installation disc, I am unable to choose "repair your computer". When I click it, I get "This version of System recovery options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair". Odd, considering I used the disc to recover windows just a few days ago. It is worth noting that the CD/DVD is not SP1, and my version I'm attempting to restore is SP1, but after some research and a strong hunch, I'm pretty sure getting a SP1 CD/DVD will give me the same error at the expense of the time it takes to make the disc...
More on this, I created a paragon adaptive recovery disc to attempt to fix the OS-MB relation, but am unable to select UEFI CD/DVD when the paragon DVD is in the drive.
Also when I boot, the BIOS for the SAS card comes up showing that my SSD array is working properly.
Furthermore, whenever I go to restart the computer, my motherboard gives me the "FF" failure error, and needs to be hard powered off, which seems to be solved HERE, however I can not boot from the USB in order to update my BIOS and fix the restart issue.
This also affects resetting the CMOS, because after every CMOS reset I do, the motherboard gives me FF error, and I need to hard reset. After the reset, I get the CMOS checksum error, which can occur from improper power-off after a CMOS reset, and requires a soft restart.... which is impossible because I am unable to update my BIOS.
So you can see I have myself quite the conundrum here.
I almost definitely forgot something, so I'll be editing this post periodically.
I know this problem has been solved and outlined thousands of times in the past. However, I believe my problem is actually unique, you'll see why soon.
My problem is this, I recently upgraded my motherboard/CPU, and am unable to boot past the motherboard splash screen. Once the splash screen goes away, there is the dreaded blinking underscore in the top left indicating that it can't find a bootable operating system.
Here are my pre-upgrade specs:
AMD FX-6200
Radeon HD7850
Asus M5 A99X Evo
Toshiba 2TB HDD
Here's the kicker:
Highpoint RocketRAID 2720SGL SCSI Controller
2x 800GB SAS SSDs arranged in a JBOD with Windows 7 installed
Post-upgrade specs:
Intel Core i7 4790k
EVGA Z87 FTW
Everything else is the same
In the UEFI, I can see that my new CPU is recognized, my SATA HDD is recognized and my Highpoint controller is also recognized with information on all of them. In the boot order, I am able to select the Highpoint SAS card, the Toshiba HDD, the USB drive I made and the CD/DVD with Windows on it. However, I am unable to boot from any except the CD/DVD ONLY when I use UEFI mode, so that means that a regular non-UEFI CD/DVD boot is impossible at this time.
Using UEFI mode to boot from the windows installation disc, I am unable to choose "repair your computer". When I click it, I get "This version of System recovery options is not compatible with the version of windows you are trying to repair". Odd, considering I used the disc to recover windows just a few days ago. It is worth noting that the CD/DVD is not SP1, and my version I'm attempting to restore is SP1, but after some research and a strong hunch, I'm pretty sure getting a SP1 CD/DVD will give me the same error at the expense of the time it takes to make the disc...
More on this, I created a paragon adaptive recovery disc to attempt to fix the OS-MB relation, but am unable to select UEFI CD/DVD when the paragon DVD is in the drive.
Also when I boot, the BIOS for the SAS card comes up showing that my SSD array is working properly.
Furthermore, whenever I go to restart the computer, my motherboard gives me the "FF" failure error, and needs to be hard powered off, which seems to be solved HERE, however I can not boot from the USB in order to update my BIOS and fix the restart issue.
This also affects resetting the CMOS, because after every CMOS reset I do, the motherboard gives me FF error, and I need to hard reset. After the reset, I get the CMOS checksum error, which can occur from improper power-off after a CMOS reset, and requires a soft restart.... which is impossible because I am unable to update my BIOS.
So you can see I have myself quite the conundrum here.
I almost definitely forgot something, so I'll be editing this post periodically.