Question No longer booting from NVMe on Asus Z590

[ssanto]

Last year, my son and I built a gaming computer. It's on wheels so I can roll it into my office to use with my racing simulator and he can roll it back to his room.

Yesterday, the computer got into a situation where it goes straight to the BIOS configuration when it boots up. Pressing F11 for a boot menu did not show any options other than "Enter Setup". The computer has 2 NVMe drives in it, one for the Windows OS and the other for storage. Both drives show up as discovered in the BIOS.

On the back of the computer, there is a button to clear the CMOS. I suspect that it got pushed when we were swapping cables. I've been monkeying around in the BIOS trying to find a setting to get it back to booting to the Windows OS NVMe and pressing the button to reset my work. I tried CSM - nope. Turned off TPM - nope. Turned off secure boot - nope.

I dug out an old SATA SSD from his last computer and the thing booted right into that. And from Windows on the old SSD, I can see both NVMe drives.

So then I made a Windows 10 install USB and put a fresh copy of Windows 10 on the _storage_ NVMe drive. We backed up the data and I didn't want to mess with the OS one because I'm hoping to get that drive back to bootable again somehow. Now the computer boots fine from that NVMe. But will not boot from the original OS NVMe. I swapped the NVMe slots around and that didn't help.

My suspicion is that the CMOS got cleared and the keys (or whatever) that makes the "secure boot" stuff work were lost and now that NVMe with the OS can no longer be booted from.

So worst case scenario is that I have to start over with a fresh Windows install and get all the drivers and updates done. Worst part will be setting up iRacing for the graphics card and stuff. I'd like to avoid that. I suppose I should have taken better notes when I did it the first time...

Any suggestions on how to revive booting from the original Windows OS NVMe?

Thanks,
Sal

 

[ssanto]

Update -

I tested my hypothesis that clearing the CMOS breaks the ability to boot from an NVMe. I just cleared the CMOS and the computer is still able to boot from the freshly-imaged NVMe.

So I'm still not sure why the original OS NVMe is no longer bootable.... and clearly don't know how to fix it. But I guess on the bright side, accidentally pushing that super-accessible button won't screw up the computer in the future. So I guess that's nice to know.