PC won't boot with M.2 installed

[throwaway387]

Hi everyone,

Recently I did some upgrades to my system, which includes a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and M.2 SSD (970 Evo).

It worked splendid for multiple days, when I started feeling bottlenecked in Modern Warfare (which was installed on the new M.2). I decided to run a Userbenchmark to see if anything was up, upon running this, after the benchmark was done, the Userbenchmark reported back with missing SSDs/HDDs. When I went into my disk list, I noticed my M.2 was gone, so I rebooted .. Oh boy. Upon rebooting, I just had a black screen with no indicators, keyboard, mouse and monitors were on and connected, however, no display/POST(?).

I was furious, no clue what to do, so I decided to start from the beginning, assemble one part at a time, to figure out what is going on. I quickly realized, that everything was perfectly fine, as long as the M.2 wasn't placed inside my build.

What can be wrong..?

CPU: i5 10600k
MOBO: Asus Z490-F

RAM: Corsair 32 GB (2 x 16 GB)

GPU: RTX 2080 TI
SSD: Samsung 860 EVO
SSD: Kingston (something something) regular SSD
M.2: Samsung 970 Evo

[WkdPaul]

Since you can't boot if the M.2 is installed, it really sounds like a dead drive.

 

Any way you can test it in another build?

Edited September 26, 2020 by wkdpaul

[throwaway387]

9 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

Since you can't boot if the M.2 is installed, it really sounds like a dead drive.

 

Any way you can test it in another build?

Sadly that isn't possible, the only other build in my household doesn't support M.2, and my friends have the same issue - no M.2 support.  It's literally a week old, this sucks.

[throwaway387]

23 minutes ago, King Spartan said:

so sometimes if you have m.2 and SSD's you have to skip the first 2 sata ports on your motherboard 

As per the Z490-F manual, If you use M.2_1, SATA6_52 (or something like that) is disconnected; I've made VERY sure, that the slots being disconnected/disabled are not one of those ports.