PC won't boot from SSD after BIOS flash

[Nick Hant]

So, a couple of days back I started getting a memory management BSOD when playing Starcraft 2, a decently intense game, after running it for just a few minutes. I had played it for quite a long time before the event with no real issues.

I didn't try running any other games in the meantime, and although there was no other apparent problem, I got a notification from Windows to "fix drive errors" or something like that, a notification I also noticed while tabbing out of SC2 earlier, before a BSOD. I clicked it and nothing happened, and a bit later I restarted.

At this point, I had done a bit of digging around and found a thread that appeared to have the same issue with me, with a similar setup, as well.

One of the fixes suggested by the solution was flashing the BIOS, which I did, successfully. Problem is, after rebooting when the flashing process was completed, I got a "Reboot and select proper boot device" message, so I couldn't access Windows anymore.

I tried reseting BIOS to default, running startup repair through a Win10 USB I made on another PC, which gave me a "startup repair couldn't repair your PC" message, and sfc /scannow found no integrity violations. So here I am, looking for any advice.

OS: Win10 Pro 64bit
Mobo: MSI H110M PRO-VD
CPU: Intel i5 6500
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
RAM: 1x 8GB Corsair DDR4
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB
SSD: Corsair 120GB (Windows are installed on this, don't have the exact model on me right now)

Note that I built this rig about 5 months ago, with my only other issue being a couple of random, not reoccuring BSODs while playing GTA4 a couple of months back, which I dismissed as Win10 being trippy, and nothing had come up ever since, until just now.

PS: If the formatting looks bad, blame my phone.

 

[Colif]

looking at specs, hard to imagine a board with only sata would offer IDE. Maybe RAID, but not IDE: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/H110M-PRO-VD.html#hero-specification

keep it up though, ideas are good

 

[androbourne]

Well... The point was to try another Sata mode. I've never seen a motherboard where it only had one Sata mode. Ever.

While I don't have this exact board. I have an MSI board currently and have all those options.

If you can't change modes and already tried factory defaulting the BIOS. I would try a manual factory reset.

Power down the system, unplug the power cable and remove the CMOS chip. Hit the power button a few times to drain any remaining power in the unit and allow to sit for a few minutes. Put the CMOS back in and boot back into the BIOS.

 

[Nick Hant]

Guess I'll try that when I get back home.

 

[Nick Hant]

I assume you meant the CMOS battery, btw.

 

[androbourne]

Yes the battery lol.

 

[Nick Hant]

Yeah, no luck, as expected. The reset was performed successfully, the options we were discussing remained the same.

 

[RetiredChief]

My Boot disk got hosed, Tried the Bootrec cmds - No help. Then MB died, so Bought new MB, CPU and Ram.
Ref your comment about diskpart not working. Just a question, you did select the correct disk before entering "Clean". ie List disk, then Select disk x (X being the Number of ssd) disk, then "Clean". If that works then try installing Windows.

Comment on BSODs - They can be deadly. Normally only minor damage -> none. However; on rare occasions they can hose up a HDD (SSD), or corrupt BIOS that may not be repairable by the owner. Reason if a memory pointer gets hosed and it writes to a weird place on Drive or in Bios.

 

[Nick Hant]

Yeah, I'm sure I picked the correct disk, the response was a message saying I can't clean the current boot drive or something like that, don't remember the exact wording.

 

[Colif]

you could try removing ssd, installing windows 10 on the hdd and then once it boots, reinstall the ssd and try to delete the ssd while booting off HDD, and then try to install win 10 on ssd again once its blank?

 

[Nick Hant]

I'll try that, but do I have to format my HDD in order to install Windows on it or do anything else, or can I just install as is?

 

[Colif]

Sorry I am slow to answer, been sick last few days... You shouldn't have to do anything to hdd, Win 10 will do it all - but it will delete anything on it so backup first if you can

 

[Nick Hant]

Can I possibly partition the HDD to circumvent having to delete everything, or will that not help? Also, thanks for taking the time to respond, albeit slowly.

 

[Colif]

It depends on what format the HDD is currently in.

If its GPT then you might be able to just give win 10 access to some space to install in, so if you resizing a partition to give it space, leave the unused space as unallocated (IF hdd was blank before you installed win 10 then it should be formatted as GPT)

If HDD is MBR, then you could change the boot method in BIOS to legacy, resize a partition to unallocated space and install win 10 on the blank part

Win 10 clean install guide: http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1950-windows-10-clean-install.html

 

[Nick Hant]

So, I partitioned my HDD, it's formatted in GPT. I installed Win10 on the partition I created and wiped, problem is, as soon as I get to the point where there's a forced reboot, I can't proceed any further. If the USB is still connected to the PC, it defaults to booting off of that, if I force it to boot from the HDD it still goes to the USB after showing me the Win10 logo for a bit, and if I disconnect the USB and try booting from HDD I get the familiar message "Reboot and select proper boot device". So, before I wipe my HDD, should I try taking my SSD to a friend's place and see if his PC can boot from it, see if it's not the SSD that's causing the problem?

 

[Colif]

Sigh, I seen that before and its not a sign of anything other than installer being dumb.

If you willing to try again, when you get to step 14 here: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1950-clean-install-windows-10-a.html - remove the USB drive before PC restarts and see if it works properly. I have seen it loop around on installs before and I really don't know why it does it.

 

[Nick Hant]

Did that, no luck, still getting the proper boot device message.

 

[Colif]

take ssd to friends house and check it out, I wouldn't try to boot from it but should be able to look at contents.

same reaction on 2 drives has me thinking its not the drives at all.

Looking more like the flash caused the problem (which is where we started). How did you flash it? using MFlash or Live update 6? Since you reset CMOS already, its likely you need to download the bios again and reflash it (I would use M Flash since its built into BIOS) See page 17 of your manual

 

[Nick Hant]

Yeah, that's what I thought as well, and why I suggested taking my SSD to my friend's place. I flashed the BIOS using M-Flash, following a tutorial video linked on the MSI site, IIRC. It didn't cross my mind that it could be the flash that caused it cause I got no error message or had any trouble with BIOS, but apparently those aren't sufficient indicators. I'll swing by my friends place, but I don't know if that'll be today or tomorrow, so I'll get back to you whenever I've checked.

 

[Colif]

You could try to install linux on PC and see if it works, its not letting windows on, see if it lets anything on.

I don't like messing with BIOS, if it were me I would take PC to a store and get them to see if they can install windows or anything onto PC. They have spares and might tell us if its motherboard or just the bios.

 

[Nick Hant]

Turns out my friend is also having trouble with his PC, so I guess I'll have to take it to a shop myself.

 

[Colif]

hopefully its a trustworthy shop and won't try to tell you that you need to rebuy win 10 to install it or ask for a licence key, as they don't need the key to reinstall win 10

 

[Nick Hant]

Nah, I explained the issue to him and he basically said that he'll try seeing if he can salvage the BIOS/mobo, else I'll most likely have to get a new mobo. Also side note, I think I figured out why I couldn't for the life of me clean the SSD. If Windows considered it an HDD and tried to delete its contents as such, it would make sense that nothing is being deleted, since SSDs have a different way of "organizing data", from what I gathered. (Yes, I did some digging).

 

[Colif]

different way... yes, that is 1 way to say it.
HDD are made of solid disc platters which spin at a fairly high speed and where data is recorded physically onto the platters, they have sectors, volumes, and so on so that the read head knows what disk to read the data you are after.

SSD can be seen as ram, there are no moving parts, seek speed is way higher than hdd because of that.. among other reasons. How the ssd knows where your data resides is an interesting question but since ssd wear out differently to hdd, they may move the data around more to keep an even write usage count across all its memory.

hdd use defrag to keep them in tip top order, SSD use trim and in many cases its automatically done as soon as you delete something. Before win 10 this would have made a bigger difference as defrag was 1 tool many people just ignored, now win 10 will run it if PC is idling and hasn't run one recently.

Pretty sure Windows can tell difference between both types.

 

[androbourne]

Abnormally running defrag on an SSD can totally ruin the drive. It's not meant to handle data in the same manner as an HHD.

You may want to double check your SSD now.

 

[Colif]

And yet, once a month win 10 will run defrag on the ssd, its not as bad as you think. Win 10 will defrag it if you have shadow copy turned on, and since that is on by default as it is how system restore works, every ssd is scanned once a month by defrag

Storage Optimizer will defrag an SSD once a month if volume snapshots are enabled. This is by design and necessary due to slow volsnap copy on write performance on fragmented SSD volumes. It’s also somewhat of a misconception that fragmentation is not a problem on SSDs. If an SSD gets too fragmented you can hit maximum file fragmentation (when the metadata can’t represent any more file fragments) which will result in errors when you try to write/extend a file. Furthermore, more file fragments means more metadata to process while reading/writing a file, which can lead to slower performance.

As far as Retrim is concerned, this command should run on the schedule specified in the dfrgui UI. Retrim is necessary because of the way TRIM is processed in the file systems. Due to the varying performance of hardware responding to TRIM, TRIM is processed asynchronously by the file system. When a file is deleted or space is otherwise freed, the file system queues the trim request to be processed. To limit the peek resource usage this queue may only grow to a maximum number of trim requests. If the queue is of max size, incoming TRIM requests may be dropped. This is okay because we will periodically come through and do a Retrim with Storage Optimizer. The Retrim is done at a granularity that should avoid hitting the maximum TRIM request queue size where TRIMs are dropped.

https://superuser.com/questions/1150641/should-i-defragment-my-ssd