Asus latop cold boots to BIOS, and boots to Windows only after "save and exit" bios setting is selected

[LauRoman]

i have moved systems to ssd for a while now, but this behaviour has stomped me.

 

An in-law asked me to move his system from a hdd to a ssd. It is an asus x55c-so202d according to the sticker.

 

I have not booted the system beforehand to see it's behaviour. Just cloned the drive to a ssd and booted that.

 

I booted it with the battery removed and assumed any weirdness maybe because of that or some janky bios.

As soon as i saw it booted, i formatted the old hdd and moved it to the opical bay with a caddy so i really can't test if the hdd behaved the same with it.

After pressing "save and exit" (F10 for this laptop) it boots to windows.

 

Restarting the machine from windows, it boots to windows just fine. Only cold booting seems to be weird.

I have replaced the bios battery thinking weirdness there. Also put back the optical drive to see if that was weirding the bios out. Same thing.

 

In-law says it did not behave this way when it had windows on the hdd, but i did see traces of repairs on the laptop (nothing serious, just broken and glued plastic nut holder thingys)

 

i have swapped the ssd with another one that has ubuntu on it and that cold boots just fine.

 

So i am thnking it may be weirdness with the ssd he bough (an hp s600 240gb) or some weidnes with the boot partition, as the hdd, and subsequently the hp ssd are gpt formatted and the ubuntu ssd is mbr formatted.

 

 

Any ideas on what i should check for?

Edited January 23, 2021 by LauRoman
Typos

[AndreiArgeanu]

Could be potentially an issue with the fact that you cloned the SSD and that caused compatibility issues. Have you tried installing Windows normally to the SSD? Also have you tried making a Windows boot media with a MBR partition scheme? (You can do so using Rufus).

[LauRoman]

Just now, AndreiArgeanu said:

Could be potentially an issue with the fact that you cloned the SSD and that caused compatibility issues. Have you tried installing Windows normally to the SSD? Also have you tried making a Windows boot media with a MBR partition scheme? (You can do so using Rufus).

I would do that normally anyway with systems i have setup, but the person who the laptop belongs to has no ideea what their windows and other programs' licenses are as their daughter installed it for them, nor the windows password, as they use a pin to login.

[LauRoman]

Furher developments. I have installed ubuntu on a gpt partitioned ssd and hdd the same issue appears to arise.

[Roswell]

You probably set it up with MBR instead of GPT before you cloned it.

 

Disable secure boot and make sure UEFI is enabled.

[LauRoman]

7 hours ago, Vitamanic said:

You probably set it up with MBR instead of GPT before you cloned it.

 

Disable secure boot and make sure UEFI is enabled.

Nope, the machine seems to cold boot mbr discs just fine. It can't seem to cold boot gpt discs which is weird because the original hdd was gpt partitioned because it showed as such in the cloning software. And the ssd was never formatted before being cloned to.

 

Bios does not detect any gpt partitioned drive on cold boot but does after a restart and "launch efi shell from filesystem device" gives a not found waring regardless of cold booting or not.

 

Bios has no set to uefi or csm mode only, no way to disable fast bootbot or secure boot or any kind of way to see if they are on or not.

 

I think i will just break down and get one of those cheap grey market windows licenses, install it on the ssd after it is mbr formatted and deal with any aftermath from the in-law if it arises.

 

I just hate not being able to at least find out what is going on.

Edited January 24, 2021 by LauRoman
Some clarification

[LauRoman]

figured it out

 

The hp s600 ssd they bought seem to have compatibility issues with the asus x55c laptop. As the ssd boots fine on another pc or laptop and another ssd boots fine in the laptop.

 

And after installing windows in mbr mode on that ssd, it can't properly shut down or restart it. After a few minutes it shows a Driver Power State Failure stop code bsod and the power indicator and wifi led stay on until a force reboot. 

If installed in mbr mode the laptop will not boot to bios, but it will show a familiar "reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key" message that is fixed by a ctrl alt del and boots to windows

 

eff that effin hp ssd and the boat it came in on, or that cheap crappy laptop. As this is the only combination it does not work in. The ssd works fine in other systems (i have) and other drives (i have) work fine on the laptop

 

 

I haven't seen weirdness like this since i had some old boards unable to boot from sata if any ide drive was connected, regardless of boot order, or memory incompatibility during the ddr 3 era

[AtticusRed]

Was having this issue for a good year. The fix for me was my ASUS x99 motherboard had it's AI suite software and that installed a bad usb3hub driver found to be the cause in my dump files. After I uninstalled the software I haven't had a bluescreen since. You might have to uninstall that usb3hub driver.

In general if you look at your last dump file with windbg it will tell you what the cause is. You might be able to just uninstall the driver shown in that dump. 

Hope this helps.