[SOLVED] Z77 issues

Ozark Mountain

Honorable
Mar 25, 2016
33
0
10,540
I've had consistent issues with two different brands of z77 motherboard. The first one is an ECS Z77H2A4. The second is my new ASRock z77 Xtreme 4. I had the ECS first and it has developed the problem of having BIOS burn in. It will only accept my five terabyte HDD (which it forces me to partition to two terabytes and leave the remaining space unusable,) as the boot drive. When I upgraded to the z77 Xtreme 4 last night I tried immediately to switch it to a Windows 7 SSD, But when I tried to start it up it would only boot in safe mode. If I tried to start windows normally it would load up to my background but never load file explorer. So I tried to reconnect the five terabyte HDD to the new ASRock mother board and I'm suddenly getting blue screen of death corruption but the blue screen doesn't stay it just flashes for the second and the computer restarts itself. it asked me if I wanted to do launch startup repair and I did it twice and it just continues to loop.

I cannot even get to a point with the HDD where I could run check disk command to see what's wrong with it and I'm going to run SSD check disk tonight and see if maybe that can resolve some issues.

If they fail what are my other options? I really hope that this z77 extreme 4 didn't have BIOS burn in prior to my purchase and I'm hoping that that's not causing the issue.
 
Solution
Okay so you guys are probably going to hate this, but I swear to you it's the truth. It turns out the hard drive was working fine the entire time. It auto-detected my second monitor as the primary and I didn't have that monitor turned on while I was doing testing because it has built in speakers so the hard drive works fine I have Windows 7 I just have to migrate my programs including office prior to reformatting.

I don't know what it is with this particular hard drive or this particular version of Windows 7 but even if I do a registry check everything comes back as working perfectly Just need to update new drivers and uninstall the old AMD ones from when it was in the laptop

So this exact same windows 7 pro SSD has now worked on four...
D

Deleted member 2720853

Guest
No I haven't yet. Do I have to do that each time? I've never had a problem swapping loaded hard drives between laptops I didn't think it would be any different with the desktop
Different motherboards have different chipsets. You have your old motherboards' chipsets on that hard drive and Windows installation, not to mention all the little registry tidbits the old motherboard wrote which the new motherboard has to use now.

Every time you replace motherboard, you HAVE to do a clean reinstallation.

You cannot put a drive with a pre-installed OS on another PC with a completely different motherboard without having to deal with a lot of preventable issues.
 

Ozark Mountain

Honorable
Mar 25, 2016
33
0
10,540
You got lucky with the laptops.
Yeah I've ran the same 500 GB Samsung 850 Evo in a Lenovo X230T, and 8th gen Acer Nitro 5, and even my last desktop which had a gigabyte z97 motherboard, with the same copy of Windows 7 professional, The only thing I've had to do is remove drivers that were no longer valid and download and install new drivers
 

Ozark Mountain

Honorable
Mar 25, 2016
33
0
10,540
Different motherboards have different chipsets. You have your old motherboards' chipsets on that hard drive and Windows installation, not to mention all the little registry tidbits the old motherboard wrote which the new motherboard has to use now.

Every time you replace motherboard, you HAVE to do a clean reinstallation.

You cannot put a drive with a pre-installed OS on another PC with a completely different motherboard without having to deal with a lot of preventable issues.
So it doesn't matter that both boards are z77 chipsets and they were both manufactured in 2012? Is it just because one is ECS and the other one is ASRock?
 
D

Deleted member 2720853

Guest
So it doesn't matter that both boards are z77 chipsets and they were both manufactured in 2012? Is it just because one is ECS and the other one is ASRock?
Yes, it doesn't matter. Always, and I can't stress it enough, always reinstall OS after changing motherboard, or migrating a HDD with an OS on it to a new motherboard.
 

Ozark Mountain

Honorable
Mar 25, 2016
33
0
10,540
Using a HDD with an OS on it on another computer. Like what you did with the laptops.
Okay that makes sense. I'm not exactly a terminology person. I also thought about just buying a pre-loaded one from eBay and doing it that way. I don't know if I still have my Windows 7 activation code lying around somewhere If I do a fresh install it's going to want me to put the code in again right?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Yeah I've ran the same 500 GB Samsung 850 Evo in a Lenovo X230T, and 8th gen Acer Nitro 5, and even my last desktop which had a gigabyte z97 motherboard, with the same copy of Windows 7 professional, The only thing I've had to do is remove drivers that were no longer valid and download and install new drivers
I've had it work with two somewhat dissimilar desktops.
I've had it fail with two almost identical laptops.

Basically, 3 possibilities:
  1. It boots up just fine
  2. It fails completely
  3. It boots up, but you're chasing issues for weeks or months.
I've seen all 3.

A clean install is always recommended, often required.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Okay that makes sense. I'm not exactly a terminology person. I also thought about just buying a pre-loaded one from eBay and doing it that way. I don't know if I still have my Windows 7 activation code lying around somewhere If I do a fresh install it's going to want me to put the code in again right?
Buying a drive with a drive with a preinstalled OS?
That is ALWAYS a bad idea. Always.
 

Ozark Mountain

Honorable
Mar 25, 2016
33
0
10,540
Buying a drive with a drive with a preinstalled OS?
That is ALWAYS a bad idea. Always.
I guess I'll try a clean install tonight and hopefully it recognizes my activation or maybe I can find some way to check my activation code prior to doing the clean install while in safety mode. I just rather stop using my 5 TB HDD as a 2 TB and as my primary program drive. I already had one of these stupid hard drives fail within 12 months of ownership
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I guess I'll try a clean install tonight and hopefully it recognizes my activation or maybe I can find some way to check my activation code prior to doing the clean install while in safety mode. I just rather stop using my 5 TB HDD as a 2 TB and as my primary program drive. I already had one of these stupid hard drives fail within 12 months of ownership
Belarc Advisor can probably discover your existing license key.
https://www.belarc.com/products_belarc_advisor
 

Ozark Mountain

Honorable
Mar 25, 2016
33
0
10,540
Okay so you guys are probably going to hate this, but I swear to you it's the truth. It turns out the hard drive was working fine the entire time. It auto-detected my second monitor as the primary and I didn't have that monitor turned on while I was doing testing because it has built in speakers so the hard drive works fine I have Windows 7 I just have to migrate my programs including office prior to reformatting.

I don't know what it is with this particular hard drive or this particular version of Windows 7 but even if I do a registry check everything comes back as working perfectly Just need to update new drivers and uninstall the old AMD ones from when it was in the laptop

So this exact same windows 7 pro SSD has now worked on four different computers, two laptops and two desktops.
 
Last edited:
Solution