Boot device issues.

[Technoguy505]

Hello Forum, I was up all night last night troubleshooting a recent build of scrap parts. The specs are Ryzen 5 3600, Gigabyte GA-A320M-S2H, XFX RX570, and a Kingston SA400S37 250gb SSD. The PC posts and boots into the bios but that's about it. When plugging the windows installation media into it, it boots to it, but upon selecting the Kingston drive, the installation throws an error message "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu." I did some googling, and saw multiple threads on things to do and I attempted many of them. I disabled CSM, disabled secure-boot, and still nothing. So in my troubleshooting efforts, I attempted to plug the drive into another PC, install windows, and plug it back in. The drive is recognized as a bootable device by the other system, but when plugging it into the secondary PC, it boots straight to the bios. When I hit F12 to show boot options, the computer (I think) sees the drive but it's a blank option, and the other option is "Cancel" or something along those lines. I've troubleshooted several computers doing dumb things like this, but I have 0 clue where to go from here. I hope you all are able to help. 

[Shooterdude34]

11 minutes ago, Technoguy505 said:

Hello Forum, I was up all night last night troubleshooting a recent build of scrap parts. The specs are Ryzen 5 3600, Gigabyte GA-A320M-S2H, XFX RX570, and a Kingston SA400S37 250gb SSD. The PC posts and boots into the bios but that's about it. When plugging the windows installation media into it, it boots to it, but upon selecting the Kingston drive, the installation throws an error message "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu." I did some googling, and saw multiple threads on things to do and I attempted many of them. I disabled CSM, disabled secure-boot, and still nothing. So in my troubleshooting efforts, I attempted to plug the drive into another PC, install windows, and plug it back in. The drive is recognized as a bootable device by the other system, but when plugging it into the secondary PC, it boots straight to the bios. When I hit F12 to show boot options, the computer (I think) sees the drive but it's a blank option, and the other option is "Cancel" or something along those lines. I've troubleshooted several computers doing dumb things like this, but I have 0 clue where to go from here. I hope you all are able to help. 

Have you tried formatting the drive before installing windows? sometimes if a drive has been previously used it could also already have a partition on it, in which case you would have to delete said partition when installing windows. 

does the drive say "Drive 0 Unallocated Space"?

[CompMakesMeCry]

I had a somewhat similair problem. My solution was to reset the bios the factory settings after that it worked fine. make so select reset to factory setting and not to default settings.

[An0maly_76]

15 minutes ago, Technoguy505 said:

Hello Forum, I was up all night last night troubleshooting a recent build of scrap parts. The specs are Ryzen 5 3600, Gigabyte GA-A320M-S2H, XFX RX570, and a Kingston SA400S37 250gb SSD. The PC posts and boots into the bios but that's about it. When plugging the windows installation media into it, it boots to it, but upon selecting the Kingston drive, the installation throws an error message "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu." I did some googling, and saw multiple threads on things to do and I attempted many of them. I disabled CSM, disabled secure-boot, and still nothing. So in my troubleshooting efforts, I attempted to plug the drive into another PC, install windows, and plug it back in. The drive is recognized as a bootable device by the other system, but when plugging it into the secondary PC, it boots straight to the bios. When I hit F12 to show boot options, the computer (I think) sees the drive but it's a blank option, and the other option is "Cancel" or something along those lines. I've troubleshooted several computers doing dumb things like this, but I have 0 clue where to go from here. I hope you all are able to help. 

Saw this before with another member. The referenced drive is listed in the QVL, but the GA-A320 board BIOS revisions somewhere along the line removed certain device support before the update for the 3600(X), which further complicated things by removing more device support. Unfortunately, the BIOS revision list is a dumpster fire.

 

I had to check to be sure, the referenced drive is a SATA3 and the board does have SATA3 ports, so that shouldn't be an issue. The board does have an M.2 slot, do you have one installed? If so, some boards disable certain SATA ports with an M.2 installed. Also, is does the cable you're using support SATA3? If not, that could be a problem. Otherwise, I think it's time for a B450 board.

[191x7]

Latest bios?

[OddOod]

Welcome to the forums!

 

1 hour ago, Technoguy505 said:

the computer (I think) sees the drive

can you show us what you see when you think you see this?

[Technoguy505]

15 hours ago, Shooterdude34 said:

Have you tried formatting the drive before installing windows? sometimes if a drive has been previously used it could also already have a partition on it, in which case you would have to delete said partition when installing windows. 

does the drive say "Drive 0 Unallocated Space"?

Yes, I have formatted the drive. Yes it does say “Unallocated space”

[Technoguy505]

14 hours ago, OddOod said:

Welcome to the forums!

 

can you show us what you see when you think you see this?

Yes, I will attach a picture as soon as I get off work tomorrow and have a chance to boot the PC up

[Technoguy505]

14 hours ago, 191x7 said:

Latest bios?

That is my next step in the troubleshooting steps. The strange thing is, this PC originated as a Pre-built. It has almost the exact parts back in it (the exception is the drive and the RAM) and it worked perfectly before. I plan to update the bios as soon as I get a chance to work on it tomorrow.

[Technoguy505]

15 hours ago, An0maly_76 said:

Saw this before with another member. The referenced drive is listed in the QVL, but the GA-A320 board BIOS revisions somewhere along the line removed certain device support before the update for the 3600(X), which further complicated things by removing more device support. Unfortunately, the BIOS revision list is a dumpster fire.

 

I had to check to be sure, the referenced drive is a SATA3 and the board does have SATA3 ports, so that shouldn't be an issue. The board does have an M.2 slot, do you have one installed? If so, some boards disable certain SATA ports with an M.2 installed. Also, is does the cable you're using support SATA3? If not, that could be a problem. Otherwise, I think it's time for a B450 board.

I’m not sure about the SATA cable. The only drive installed in the system would be the drive I’m having issues with. I would upgrade the board, but it’s just a secondary PC I plan on using for a Minecraft server. I have these select parts laying around after I have pretty much upgraded the original pre-built to be a completely separate computer. I’m going to attempt to update the bios whenever I have a chance to tomorrow. Thank you for your detailed response.

[Technoguy505]

15 hours ago, CompMakesMeCry said:

I had a somewhat similair problem. My solution was to reset the bios the factory settings after that it worked fine. make so select reset to factory setting and not to default settings.

I did reset the bios to just default settings. I can attempt to remove the CMOS battery to completely reset the bios, but i figured the setting inside the bios itself did the same thing.

[Technoguy505]

Okay, So I updated the BIOS last night, and that helped, but it's kind of a two steps forward one step back kind of thing. After updating the bios, The BIOS saw the drive as a boot device, but upon booting to it, it says "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key". So my first thought was "Oh windows must have not finished installing, so I created a new media installation flash drive, and windows actually let me install to the drive from this PC, but after windows rebooted to boot back to the actual drive, it gave me the same error message. I checked to see if it was proper boot order and sure enough it was still selected as boot device 1. If anyone has any advice, please let me know. Because this is a spare PC, upgrading any parts of the machine other than the drive (because I have a hard drive laying around (That I'd prefer not to use)) is not feasible. Thanks in advance for your help!

[OddOod]

Do you have a spare drive you can toss in and see if that works? I just last week ran into an extremely weird drive recognition error and had to mulligan and replace it. Drive works fine in other machines, other drives work fine in that machine, the two just refused to work together. 
The other explanation is a borked mobo and RMA