Upgrade to Windows 11 Causing Boot Loop

[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!

[KnightMaire]

Got the same issue and am working on it and saw your post.

 

I did not upgrade to Windows 11, but after this months update encountered this.

 

Some commonalities:

I have a Gigabyte Z270X-Designare-CF

CPU is an intel, but probably not relevant.

Boot drive is an M.2 Samsung 970

Storage is an Samsung 850

Corsair vengeance RGB ram also not likely relevant

 

Using and nVidia 1080.

 

I fiddled with BIOS settings a bit, and discovered that it will acknowledge the existence of this unlabeled drive, and setting the boot order does not work as it reverts to the original settings.   Advanced mode does not reveal this ghost drive. 

Tried different combinations with CSM regarding UEFI and legacy, with no change. 

There are not any boot order options that resolve this in the BIOS from my experimentation but will be happy to be corrected and will entertain any suggestions made. 

 

I do notice that I have a second recovery partition in Disk Management that is unusual.  Ill be digging into this symptom after I post this. 

 

 

 

 

[KnightMaire]

On 1/18/2022 at 9:26 PM, RBB24 said:

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!

 

Disabled Windows 8/10 WHQL and used Windows 8/10 option in my Bios Menu.   Not exactly sure what the label was, but is on the same screen that you use to configure the boot order.