New System - Long BIOS Boot and Restart Issues

Hi Everyone!

I just finished home building my first PC. SUCH a great experience and now I will never be able to go back to just buying PCs. However, I've had some issues, which might actually be one issue manifesting itself in two separate ways:

1. When I boot the PC, it takes a very long time to reach the BIOS screen. I see the HDD indicator light up three times, and then it finally turns on. I mean it's bearable, but nothing like any PC's I've owned previously.

2. My PC won't restart. If I click restart, the monitor goes black and then turns off (indicator turns orange), but everything in the case itself stays turned on. The only way to fix it is to hold down the power button and hard reset it, which normally then ends in a failed bootup. I repeat the process and then problem one occurs, followed by a successful boot. This same thing happens if I press the restart button.

One time that #2 occurred, when it booted the POST screen displayed "Failed to boot from USB device too many times." After which I went into BIOS and checked the boot order and there isn't even a USB device option displayed. Regardless, I disabled "boot from other location" besides the harddrives I had selected and the issue did not resolve itself.

So that's it, do you think it could be a SSD issue? I had installed windows on it, realized that I wasn't in AHCI mode, switched modes, and then reinstalled windows without a Secure Erase (which I know is a no-no), but I don't think that should affect BIOS.

My Rig:

AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
MSI 890GXM-G65
8GB DDR3 Microcenter Brand RAM 1333 MHz (4x2GB)
Microcenter (ADATA) 64GB SSD Sandforce 1222 Driver SATA2 (Boot Drive)
1TB Seagate Barracuda (for storage, not yet plugged in to SATA as per SSD install recommendations)

Any help would be awesome!

Chris