Windows won't boot after testing ATI card

Roxifellian · January 22

So, a little background.

My specs are:

-i7 11700K clocked at 4.18ghz

-Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB DDR4 2x8gb CL16 3600MT/s

-ASRock Z590 Pro4

-Intel 670p (512gb) -> windows drive

-Samsung 970 Evo Plus (2tb)

-Thermaltake View 71 TG RGB with an Antec fan on the bottom for more GPU airflow

-Windows 10 Pro

I had my 3060 Ti taken out of my PC to test an overheating GTX 980 (I have a post all about that if interested). Before putting my 3060 Ti back in, I decided to test an ancient relic known as the ATI HD4550. The card did work, and with the Windows 7 64-bit drivers from this official AMD source and a restart, the card worked with 1080p. This also installed something called Catalyst Control Center which would not launch after the install (something about "no settings that can be configured"). I had an overscan issue where I had a black border around the while display, so I was toying with that for a bit. One source said to try to just unplug the HDMI and plug it back in, so I tried a couple times. After about the third attempt, the display did not have a signal. When I clicked the power button once (not held or anything), the PC immediately shut off. Odd, since I did have windows running. I put my 3060 Ti back in, and same result. I also swapped the drives (aka 970 where 670 was, and vice versa).

After lots of trial and error, the system booted into the BIOS, claiming there were no bootable drives. I then made a Windows installation USB from here and booted into it. I first tried the startup repair, which gave me the result from the image attached. I then tried command prompt to see if the drives or nvme slots were dead, but thankfully they were not as seen in the second image. I then tried the actual installer. First with the windows upgrade option, it gave me the result in the third image. I've never seen that before, but I can only guess that it recognized the Windows files on the 670p. On the custom install or whatever it was, I could see the drives were again there. Although the drives were not recognized as bootable my BIOS, they were recognized as existing.

Does anyone have any idea of what I could do? Even if I could just save my files from the hard drive that would be great. I'd hope to get it back to the way it was, but anything helps really. Thanks.