X99 NVMe Debacle

[nrgrota]

Hi,

I'm having an issue I've never encountered before with a system I built 3 years ago and recently made some upgrades to, so I wanted to bump heads with some other people who might have some idea what to do.

The system is as follows:

MSI X99S SLI Plus motherboard (BIOS version 1.9)
Intel i7-5820k CPU @ 3.30GHz (never overclocked)
32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 @ 2666MHz
1x MSI GTX 1080 (originally a 980 Ti)
1x Zotac GTX 1050 Ti (originally an EVGA 750 Ti)
2x mechanical HDDs
1x Intel 530 SATA SSD (old boot drive)
1x Toshiba OCZ RD400 NVMe SSD (new boot drive)

After noticing some performance issues and generally getting tired of Windows 10 being...Windows 10, I decided to upgrade the boot drive to an NVMe and do a clean install of Windows 8.1 on the new drive, then transition the machine over to being an editing/Steam/VMware rig that I would remote into from my Linux daily drivers.

After changing the BIOS settings to enable the NVMe drive, the installation went beautifully, and I proceeded to download Windows updates and get my drivers all set up. Though I did notice the system only giving me one option in the boot menu called "Windows Boot Loader", which would ask me which version of Windows to load into while listing 10, 8.1, 7, and 8.1 (volume 5). Which it had never done before. I hadn't erased my Windows 10 installation on the other drive, because I had planned on keeping it around in case I needed it for some reason. So I assumed it was just giving me the option to select the other drive.

Once I was done, I shut everything down, unplugged the power cord, and removed the SATA SSD so it would boot directly into Windows 8 without stopping to ask me. Only now, I can't get it to boot into anything other than the EFI shell, BIOS, or bootable USB drives. With the SATA SSD disconnected, it didn't see any of my drives at all. After reconnecting it, that drive and one of my HDDs are listed in the BIOS, but the other hard drive and the NVMe aren't there and I can't select the SSD to boot into Windows 10. All of my settings are the same as when it worked, but now it just mysteriously doesn't want to acknowledge any of my drives to varying degrees.

Any ideas? I can elaborate/clarify anything if need be. Thanks in advance.

[Enderman]

You need to unplug all other drives when clean installing windows except for the one you are installing to.

[nrgrota]

That's the best way to do it to avoid accidentally overwriting something. But unless I'm mistaken and unless the bootloader gets confused somehow by having two installations on two different drives, that shouldn't matter given that the installer found the 238GB unallocated space on the new drive just fine, and everything was working normally until I removed the old drive. If that had caused an issue, it would have only been at the OS level and putting it back should have rectified the problem, but it didn't, and the problem extends to the drives not even showing up in the BIOS or boot menu.

Regardless, the objective now is to get the drives to show up again and be bootable, and I can fix any mix-ups then, even if it means formatting and reinstalling. I have no great attachment to Windows 10 anyway, I just wanted to keep it around in case I needed it down the line.

[nrgrota]

So I changed the SATA port for the SSD, then changed it back, and everything boots normally.