Question PC stopped booting from SSD-no longer seen in BIOS

[RB211]

Ok, eyes hurt from pouring over too many threads on this issue so I thought I'd post the question with more specific detail and cross my fingers......

Situation:

Windows 10 PC that has a Crucial 240GB SSD with the OS and a HD for storage. This setup has been working fine for several years but the PC is used infrequently.

This morning I saw that the monitor had the ASUS BIOS screen up so I just hit save and exit and let it continue with the boot to Windows. That didn't work and it eventually brought me back to the BIOS screen, okay bigger issue.

1. In the BIOS boot menu it just lists the Seagate HDD, the SSD is not shown which explains why it goes no further.

2. I disconnected the HDD and tried to boot which resulted in doing to the BIOS screen and showing no drives in the Boot Menu.

3. I swapped the drives/cables and again the HDD shows up but no SSD so the cables/controllers are good.

4. I plugged the SSD into my laptop and it shows just fine in file manager as an external drive

5. I put the SSD back into the PC on it's own and during the startup I pressed F2. The SSD does show up in that screen in the BIOS however if left to continue the startup to a point where the BIOS screen shows the Boot menu and drives the SSD is no longer there.

6. I have gone through the ASUS BIOS menu, which I'm not terribly happy with, can't find any suggestion or options about changing from Secure to Legacy etc.

In my pea brain it's like there is a file(s) missing on the SSD that stops it from being recognized as a bootable drive so it shows up in the boot menu and carries on to the OS.

This mysteriously just happened overnight on it's own.

Thanks in advance.....

 

[LinuxDevice]

It sounds like BIOS settings may have become corrupt. It should not have booted into the BIOS screen to start with, but once there hitting save and exit instead of exit without save would have cemented any altered settings. Can you go into your BIOS and tell it to reset to sane defaults?

Then, wherever the setting is for "UEFI" mode, versus "legacy", versus both, try setting it to UEFI mode only. I doubt an SSD or NVMe would have ever been set up for legacy BIOS mode, and very likely only UEFI mode would be used (you could in fact search for UEFI/legacy mode settings and experiment with that before ever telling the CMOS BIOS to reset to sane/default values).

 

[RB211]

It sounds like BIOS settings may have become corrupt. It should not have booted into the BIOS screen to start with, but once there hitting save and exit instead of exit without save would have cemented any altered settings. Can you go into your BIOS and tell it to reset to sane defaults?

Then, wherever the setting is for "UEFI" mode, versus "legacy", versus both, try setting it to UEFI mode only. I doubt an SSD or NVMe would have ever been set up for legacy BIOS mode, and very likely only UEFI mode would be used (you could in fact search for UEFI/legacy mode settings and experiment with that before ever telling the CMOS BIOS to reset to sane/default values).

Thanks for the quick reply...

I found under Boot/CSM that I could change the settings from Legacy to UEFI for the boot etc however it had no effect. After the restart it again settled at the BIOS screen and just showing the HDD in the boot menu.

I also found the load optimized defaults and tried that to no avail.

If a corrupt BIOS is suspected I see that it hasn't been updated likely since the purchase several years ago. Is it possible to get an updated BIOS for this MB and then flash it without the OS and restart......could that solve it?

 

[LinuxDevice]

Thanks for the quick reply...

I found under Boot/CSM that I could change the settings from Legacy to UEFI for the boot etc however it had no effect. After the restart it again settled at the BIOS screen and just showing the HDD in the boot menu.

I also found the load optimized defaults and tried that to no avail.

If a corrupt BIOS is suspected I see that it hasn't been updated likely since the purchase several years ago. Is it possible to get an updated BIOS for this MB and then flash it without the OS and restart......could that solve it?

I have no experience for that board, but it is possible a BIOS update might help. There might be other issues though, so it might not matter. You could try, but I usually save a BIOS update for when either (A), I know it is needed, e.g., to use a newer CPU, or (B), I have no other possibility beyond replacing the board.

 

[RB211]

Thanks for the input, I did flash the BIOS with the latest ver out of desperation yesterday and while it didn't solve the problem the interface is much better.

When I hit F2 and go directly into the BIOS before boot both the HDD AND the SSD boot drive do show. I did try and do a bootfix on the SSD etc without success so my plan is to replace the 240GB SSD, do a fresh install of Win 10 and see if in fact it was corrupt files on the SSD. It arrives on Thursday and was only $30 so I'll wait and see if that was the problem.

 

[israrAhmed]

I m aslo having same issue i just bought new SSD but my laptop wouldn't recognized the ssd ,,,
any suggestion please