MSI H87-G43 will not boot unless CMOS has been reset

[ChipsDotMp4]

I bought a dirt cheap T-Force SSD to revive the old Haswell family PC and repurpose it as a media center, etc. This board has always been a nightmare to use with integrated graphics, but it seemed to get into the BIOS fine with them so I figured it was fine.

 

I got windows installed, somehow, after having to pull the CMOS battery several times during the process. Now, unless I’ve pulled the battery, the system boots to a black screen with an A2 in the corner, which I’m told is an IDE error and something’s wrong with the drive configuration. The reason this is so frustrating is because the SSD is the only SATA device in the PC, I’ve unplugged the optical drives due to not needing them. 

 

The BIOS is the most recent version, downloaded directly from MSI’s website. The SSD is recognized as what it is in the BIOS. Windows boot manager is the primary boot device when I boot into BIOS. I put a brand new CMOS battery in thinking that might be the issue; it wasn’t. In spite of all this, the problem persists and I can’t boot into Windows unless I’ve taken the battery out. 

 

I doubt I have a hardware issue because when I do reset the CMOS and boot into Windows, everything works exactly as expected.

 

Anything else I could try?