ASUS Z97 Deluxe boots straight to BIOS, ignores boot devices?

cirdecus

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I recently built a new PC with an ASUS Z97 Deluxe motherboard.

The system has two 1TB Samsung EVO SSD's connected to the Intel onboard controller and setup in a RAID 0. The other SATA ports have a bluray burner, an eSATA case connector and a 6TB Enterprise drive.

I took it apart today just to move some cables around and make the case cleaner and to sleeve a few things. I also removed the 6TB drive because I think it was DOA and needs RMA'ed.

Everything went back in the way it was originally cabled, nothing changed other than the removal of that drive.

The system first boots directly into the BIOS. No error or any reasons why. I check the boot priority to ensure the Intel RAID has priority and the SATA ports are configured correctly, which they are/were.

After a few reboots, i get this red screen that comes up complaining about a Secure boot problem and that I need to find another boot device. I go into the BIOS, delete the keys for secure boot to disabled it and try to boot again, but it still goes back into the BIOS.

I haven't seen the secure boot error again, but i cannot for the life of me get this stupid board to boot to anywhere other than the BIOS. Any ideas? Latest drivers, latest firmware.
 
Solution
Is that drive GPT partitioned? Wonder if its in standard MBR format hence you are not seeing all the drive space. If the install was not performed with the UEFI prefix selected for the device that contained the Windows installer, it is likely MBR.

It's usually wise to unplug any drives that you do not wish to install the OS on when performing the install. Windows has a habit of grabbing drives and placing them into the install if it can.

raja@asus

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Sep 28, 2011
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There may be two entries for the RAID array - if so, select the Windows BOOT manager entry as primary BOOT. Try BOOT override through the available options and see if any of the devices result in an OS BOOT. If not I wonder if the MBR for your install was placed on the external drive (Windows does strange things like that). If that is the case, you may need to perform a repair via the Windows installer and see i that patches the MBR.
 

raja@asus

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Sep 28, 2011
891
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Is that drive GPT partitioned? Wonder if its in standard MBR format hence you are not seeing all the drive space. If the install was not performed with the UEFI prefix selected for the device that contained the Windows installer, it is likely MBR.

It's usually wise to unplug any drives that you do not wish to install the OS on when performing the install. Windows has a habit of grabbing drives and placing them into the install if it can.
 
Solution

cirdecus

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That was it raja@asus! Basically both things you mentioned happened, somehow both the SSD RAID and the 6TB disk had MBR's on them. Windows was using the Seagate (consequently it wasn't formatted as a GPT disk afterall).

I used the windows 7 disk to do a startup repair with the seagate removed and it rebuilt the MBR on the RAID in a few seconds and booted fine (Went into computer management to make the RAID the primary partition first).

I then booted into windows, plugged the Seagate back in and formatted it as a GPT disk and it solved both problems!

Thanks!