M2 drive boot/boot order issues

[Sergii01]

I just finished building my first high end pc(I am not new to this, just new to fancy expensive stuff) 

Im on a 9800x3d processor, on a x870e aorus elite wifi7 motherboard with a 5080, seasonic 1000w psu, noctua cooler, ddr5 cl 36 6000mhz, all hooked and powered and working correctly.

 

I also bought a 4tb samsung 980nvme ssd, at first I couldnt for the life of me install windows 11 on it, after I realized it was because a similiar samsung drive was connected I removed it and successfully installed windows, proceeded to install some apps and once I restarted the pc, i just land on the bios and my boot menu order is empty(from having the usb drive which i removed after the install).

I can see the 4tb drive in the bios which is infuriating, tpm 2.0 is on, i am on uefi and secure boot custom is on, I am really out of ideas please help

[Sawa Takahashi]

I assume you did the usual like deleting partitions and formatting since you got some experience.

My best guess would be that the SSD is defective in some way. If you have an USB enclosure for NVMe drives or another computer with a free NVMe slot, you can try testing your SSD to see if it works perfectly there. 

There is also a slight chance that your drive is from the batch of SSDs with a firmware bug that caused premature degradation. You should be able to upgrade the SSDs firmware with Samsung Magician software.

Lastly, in case tpm is the issue (you never know with those new fancy gadgets), you can normally go to the BIOS and erase TPM keys. Then you install Windows on your new SSD.

Just a note, you better remove all storage drives because Windows has a bad tendency to install the UEFI partition on a different drive if other drives are present. Once you installed and confirmed that Windows is running properly, you can plug back your drives without issues.

Another note, if you already have a Windows installation on a drive and you want to keep that drive in your system afterwards, it may conflict with the new Windows installation. I recommend erasing that drive and partition as a data disk to avoid such conflicts.

Hope that helps.

 

[OddOod]

Welcome to the forums!
To be clear, when you installed windows, you only had one drive connected, correct? If not, that can cause some issues
Regardless, I'd try installing windows again

[Sergii01]

On 12/5/2025 at 6:58 PM, Sawa Takahashi said:

I assume you did the usual like deleting partitions and formatting since you got some experience.

My best guess would be that the SSD is defective in some way. If you have an USB enclosure for NVMe drives or another computer with a free NVMe slot, you can try testing your SSD to see if it works perfectly there. 

There is also a slight chance that your drive is from the batch of SSDs with a firmware bug that caused premature degradation. You should be able to upgrade the SSDs firmware with Samsung Magician software.

Lastly, in case tpm is the issue (you never know with those new fancy gadgets), you can normally go to the BIOS and erase TPM keys. Then you install Windows on your new SSD.

Just a note, you better remove all storage drives because Windows has a bad tendency to install the UEFI partition on a different drive if other drives are present. Once you installed and confirmed that Windows is running properly, you can plug back your drives without issues.

Another note, if you already have a Windows installation on a drive and you want to keep that drive in your system afterwards, it may conflict with the new Windows installation. I recommend erasing that drive and partition as a data disk to avoid such conflicts.

Hope that helps.

 

At first I also was worried about the SSD being defective.
I did in fact re-do the tpm keys, then removed every single drive I had and install a windows 10 usb key I knew already worked, once on windows 10 I just updated the firmware of the m2 just to be sure and then I tried updating to win 11, which did not work at all, so I straight up re-installed windows 11 from an usb and has been working since then, thanks!

[Sergii01]

On 12/5/2025 at 7:32 PM, OddOod said:

Welcome to the forums!
To be clear, when you installed windows, you only had one drive connected, correct? If not, that can cause some issues
Regardless, I'd try installing windows again

Re-installing windows did it for me, except it was weird cause I couldn't update from windows 10 to windows 11, but ended up installing windows 11 with no other drives  except that m2 with firmware installed cause I managed to install windows 10 first.
And yeah it had no boot partition, it installed that on another drive as the two of you suggested, thanks for the help!