Stuck in BIOS!!!

SirFlamenco · December 27, 2018

Hi! I recently did a clean install on my pc, and everything went well, but I saw I had an outdated BIOS version so I decided to update it using Gigabyte’s Q-flash. Then, something weird happened when it finished. It rebooted 2 times, but couldn’t go to windows and left me at the bios. No biggie, I thought. I took out the usb card for the bios and the windows 10 disc I used for the clean install because I thought I wouldn’t need them. I retried booting to windows but it still didn’t work.

I then tried to install the usb card and the disc to give me as many boot options as possible, but all of them only try to boot for 2 seconds and then they come back at the boot menu/bios. I couldn’t resintall windows, and someone told me it’s because windows will not work when the bios is corrupted. So my question is, how do I get to boot to Windows? Were there any automatic backups I could use?

Edit : I have a 4tb hard drive with a 32gb optane. I used a 16gb usb drive to install windows. My motherboard is a Gigabyte z370 AORUS gaming 5. Here is a video of what happens when I try to load each boot options :

Windows7ge · December 27, 2018

What I often do is not trust those options:

It's possible the drives have been set to boot using Legacy which the BIOS may not have Legacy enabled. With what are now becoming modern boards we boot using UEFI. If the USB installer wasn't set to perform the install via UEFI then every Legacy boot option will fail.

I can't say this IS the issue but you can try two things:

1. Enable Legacy boot in the BIOS (if it isn't already)

2. Re-install windows with a USB configured with UEFI boot (if it isn't already)

If both of those are already the case then I'll need some time to think of something else. Usually when I do BIOS updates I do it the standard way via download it your self from the manufacturer, put it on a thumb drive, plug it in and do the standard flash option in the BIOS. Never used any E Z Flash tools. I don't trust them.

SirFlamenco · December 27, 2018

1 hour ago, Windows7ge said:

What I often do is not trust those options:

It's possible the drives have been set to boot using Legacy which the BIOS may not have Legacy enabled. With what are now becoming modern boards we boot using UEFI. If the USB installer wasn't set to perform the install via UEFI then every Legacy boot option will fail.

I can't say this IS the issue but you can try two things:

1. Enable Legacy boot in the BIOS (if it isn't already)

2. Re-install windows with a USB configured with UEFI boot (if it isn't already)

If both of those are already the case then I'll need some time to think of something else. Usually when I do BIOS updates I do it the standard way via download it your self from the manufacturer, put it on a thumb drive, plug it in and do the standard flash option in the BIOS. Never used any E Z Flash tools. I don't trust them.

So I have tried to boot in legacy mode but I still can’t boot successfully. I then put in the installation disc, which seems to show up as 2 options : normal and UEFI. When I disabled CSM which make the UEFI/Legacy options dissapear the windows installation disc wouldn’t work. After I put CSM , I boot into the windows setup. The "Upgrade" installation doesn’t seem to work, and the custom is giving me several partitions that all say Windows can’t be installed because the partition is "Microsoft recovery partition" but the disc is GPT. What should I do? Both of the normal installation disc options (UEFI and normal) do that.

Windows7ge · December 27, 2018

7 minutes ago, SirFlamenco said:

So I have tried to boot in legacy mode but I still can’t boot successfully. I then put in the installation disc. When I disabled CSM which I think turns on UEFI automatically, the windows installation disc wouldn’t work. After I put CSM on, I boot into the windows setup. The "Upgrade" installation doesn’t seem to work, and the custom is giving me several partitions that all say Windows can’t be installed because the partition is "Microsoft recovery partition" but the disc is GPT. What should I do?

If the board supports it UEFI should be enabled by default. You can disable Legacy and setup a bootable thumb drive using something like Rufus. Then set the boot method to UEFI only. From there the installer will set everything up using GPT.

The custom installer can be taken care of by deleting every recovery partition or by using CMD diskpart to ensure nothing is left to interfere with the install.