RBB24

Hello, LTT crowd! So, I have a very odd situation happening with my computer. After doing the free upgrade from Windows 10 to 11, my computer booted up just fine… but after just one day, problems arose. Windows had me do an update, and after that I couldn’t boot into my OS. The system would go into the BIOS screen, then the secondary MOBO logo screen, and force restart. Trying to change my boot drive didn’t work (I have two SATA SSD’s, more on that later), and even having my USB Windows Recovery stick didn’t help (though, granted it was a Win10 Recovery stick). I tried and tried different options, running CMD from the recovery drive, checking but not finding a repair option on the USB, even doing the whole “power off manually 3 times” thing that apparently Win11 does now, but nothing worked. After awhile of trying to figure out what might be wrong, I saw something very strange. From my BIOS screen I’d hit my F12 “Boot Menu” option which, rather than going into the BIOS setup, just has you select the drive you want to boot from. On this list of Drives, it listed every drive I had installed on the PC, but then there was another added onto it. I’m calling it “The Ghost Drive.” It was a blank name, and selecting it *surprise surprise* booted me into Win11 no problem. The l weirder thing is, there’s two different ways I can change my boot options. That one directly from the BIOS screen, and then the other is actually going into the BIOS setup. The weirdest thing of all is that even though The Ghost Drive popped on the F12 “Boot Menu” shortcut, I entered the BIOS to try to actually select The Ghost Drive as my main boot Drive (so I don’t have to manually select it from the F12 menu each time I start up my computer), but The Ghost Drive wasn’t listed there. For the time being, I’ve been getting by with just selecting it every time I start up my computer. So, those are the problems that I’ve had, now I’ll go over things I’ve tried more thoroughly. Everything I attempted earlier has been done, as well as trying to take out each RAM stick and putting them back in one at a time, unplugging everything but my monitor to see if that helped, and trying to do an install of Win10 from my recovery USB stick. That last method wouldn’t even let me do it, though I suppose it’s because I had Win11 installed on the PC. One of the suggestions the Tom’s Hardware folks made was to unplug my secondary storage SSD, and see about doing a fresh install on that, because supposedly Windows might have been, I guess, “cross-installed” on both without my permission. I didn’t do that, for fear of running into an issue. That issue being an SSD issue I’ve had in the past, which is the reference I made as to why I have two SSD’s. Back when I first built my PC, I only had one 1TB SSD with my Win10 OS installed on it. The issue arose, I think, from me not having an UPS to plug everything into. I had a few power outages, and the last one I had before finally getting a UPS I’m pretty sure bricked my OS. Reason I say OS and not my SSD is because I could still use my SSD for storage, but I couldn’t boot from it anymore. I ended buying the second SSD, a 2TB one, and installed Win10 on that. Once I was able to boot up from that, I tried deleting the Corrupt Win10 from the 1TB drive, but I was unable to for some weird reason (which I can’t remember exactly). So the only reason I haven’t unplugged one SSD and checking about doing a fresh install is because I’m not sure if doing so would cause more problems. If you have any suggestions for that, it’d be greatly appreciated. On a side note, if you could help me figure out a way to remove the Win10 software from my 1TB drive, as well as instruct Windows that from now on to only install updates and the OS (if I decide to update to Win12 should that come out while I’m using this computer) to my 2TB drive, that’d be great. I checked on Tom’s Hardware, and they had some suggestions for my problem, but I wanted to get a second opinion. If you could let me know of any suggestions, I’d greatly appreciate it. SPECS: Intel i7-8086k MSI Ventus RTX 2080 Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming Wi-Fi SanDisk SSD Plus 1000GB Samsung SSD 860 QVO 2TB 4x16GB 3000 Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro Corsair H100i 3 QL 120 Corsair Fans Seasonic FOCUS GX-750 80+Golf Fractal Design Meshify C unfortunately I don’t know what BIOS update I have, nor how to check it, nor even how to update it. So if you could jelly out with that too that’d be great!

In the end, I didn't put the 1060 in the system because it was just another week before I got the 2080 and I didn't want to have to worry about running into drivers issues.

Hmm... yeah, for me, I'm using my first-ever pc build. Didn't have to worry about changing out graphics drivers due to replacing a graphics card, but before completely finishing my build (gpu was the last thing I put in because I was waiting) I had a 1060 I was considering using. Got the 1060 before the 2080, and I wanted to make sure I wouldn't have any hassle if I were to install the 1060 before I got the 2080. I had seen that if you replace one graphics card with another that you first need to uninstall all drivers from the old gpu and then install the drivers for the new gpu. Now, I could be wrong, because this was back in 2018, but I believe that was the case.

Have you tried restarting the computer?

I was writing my post before seeing your second one, I've read that you actually need to uninstall the previous graphics card's drivers before installing the new GPU. I could be wrong, though. Intermediate techy here, too.

Interestingly, I had a similar issue when I first installed my MSI Ventus RTX 2080. I was getting 20-30 FPS in League of Legends. LEAGUE OF LEGENDS!! It was awhile ago, but after installing the game ready drivers from Geforce Experience and I believe some drivers from the MSI website, I restarted the computer and everything seemed to work fine.

Hello, LTT community, As the title suggests, I'm trying to solve a slightly annoying issue I've had, and while it started awhile back, I suppose one could say it's still continuing. Background: I built my very first gaming PC around November 2018. While I did build a fairly high-end PC, my budget didn't include an uninterruptible power supply, which was slightly dumb of me. Why? Because I tend to get a little restless when sitting for a while, and start kicking my legs around. I kicked the PC's power supply cable from off the wall socket several times because it was close enough to my fidgeting feet to do so... all while the PC was on, thus shutting down the PC. I believe this was 3 times in total. I finally decided to go out and get a UPS when I had enough money, but also because after that last time, my computer started having some wonky issues with the SSD. Sometimes, when booting up, the Desktop icons and background would be black, but I'd still have the Windows tray down at the bottom. Sometimes, it would restart itself during the boot up, and the final straw was when it didn't boot up at all and I had to manually shut it down. I was slightly afraid (luckily I didn't have too much important stuff on that drive, as most of it is on my laptop), thinking perhaps I lost all of my data on the drive. So, when I bought the UPS, I simultaneously bought another SSD. Installing it was a breeze, and I've not had any issues with cables coming loose due to fidgeting since I've had the UPS. Interestingly enough though, after I'd finished installing Windows onto the new drive, I figured I should try to recover the files from the old SSD. I noticed that it had the drive letter for it, but funnily enough I also noticed on the first boot that both Windows 10 OS's popped up on my boot-up. Never had a dual boot system before, so I was a little confused. The first time I went into drive D:, which was the old one popping me back up into an black screen. Restarted, booted into the new drive, and everything worked fine. Opened up the old drive's files, and surprisingly enough everything was there and nothing was corrupted or provided me any problems whatsoever. The question: Since that had happened, a question has lingered in the back of my mind. I've used the old drive for storage, and have had no problems. I've also gotten an external hard drive for backups since then as well. So backing up the system and the files is no problem. What I'm trying to figure out is two things: 1) If I removed the OS from the old drive, would I also lose the files I've put on it since then, and 2) I've thought about reformatting the drives as one combined partition (I believe that's what it is, I did take two IT courses but haven't really put the knowledge into practice - basically make both drives act as one single drive) but I'd like to know if there's a high likelihood I'll run into the weird boot-up issues I had before? The Specs: Z370 Aorus Gaming Wifi i7 8086k Windows 10 Home (on both drives) v. 1809 (at least on the new drive, possibly on both) MSI Ventus RTX 2080 32 GB of RAM running in dual channel Both SSD's still: New - 2 TB SATA SSD Old - 1 TB SATA SSD Backup - 1 TB external HDD The Thanks: Thank y'all kindly, Ryan