BIOS Boot Priority

Hi all,

I've just swapped the motherboard in my rig to the newly purchased Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH, and upon booting the machine up I set the first boot device to the DVD drive and then proceeded to wipe the SSD & re-install Windows. After the Windows set up finished copying all of the files and then rebooted to finalize the setup, when it restarted I loaded the BIOS up again and changed the boot priority round again to the SSD and then when it attempted to load Windows for the first time I was presented with the "Missing Boot MGR, press ctrl+alt+del to restart" error. This confused me a bit as I thought I had just installed windows?

Anyway, I decided to go back into the BIOS and check that I had definitely set the SSD as the boot priority which I had done but then I noticed in the BIOS that a new boot option had appeared on the list along with the SSD & the DVD drive, an option called "Windows Boot Manager". I had never seen anything like this before and it only appeared for the first time after installing Windows. I then decided to set the Windows Boot Manager as the boot priority to see what happens and rebooted, and Windows then magically started to boot up and completed the set up.

Has anybody else ever came across this before & what does it all mean? If I try and set the SSD back as the main boot priority in the BIOS, Windows will fail to boot up. Is having Windows Boot Manager set as the boot priority normal nowadays with newer boards??

Thanks all - Liam

Not seen this before, what Windows is it? I'm assuming all the other drives was unplugged during the installation?

Orcvader said:

Not seen this before, what Windows is it? I'm assuming all the other drives was unplugged during the installation?

Click to expand...

Windows 7 64-bit. Yes HDD which is the data drive was disconnected, the only devices connected were the SSD & the DVD drive. A bit of googling suggests that the SSD may be missing the Boot MGR which is to do with apparently not wiping the SSD properly before re-installing Windows (and I only did use the Windows set up to delete the partition on the SSD & the install straight from there) could this be related?

Thanks - Liam

the easiest way to solve this is sticking your disc back in, booting from cd drive again and clicking "repair computer"

it will go through, say its repaired restart and again say that bootmgr is missing.

boot from dc drive again, and repair again and i will work...

Every time i have done it, its never worked on the first attempt, so dont be disheartened by that!

*edit*

i think it does it because you had a copy of windows installed on your other disc maybe? i usually install windows using a hdd dock, and run from an image rather than disc or usb. So when i then take the drive out of my dock, and put it in a computer, it comes up because boot manager is on MY drive in my computer.

i just have a windows repair disc handy to fix it as it litterally takes about 5 mins

davido_labido said:

the easiest way to solve this is sticking your disc back in, booting from cd drive again and clicking "repair computer"

it will go through, say its repaired restart and again say that bootmgr is missing.

boot from dc drive again, and repair again and i will work...

Every time i have done it, its never worked on the first attempt, so dont be disheartened by that!

*edit*

i think it does it because you had a copy of windows installed on your other disc maybe? i usually install windows using a hdd dock, and run from an image rather than disc or usb. So when i then take the drive out of my dock, and put it in a computer, it comes up because boot manager is on MY drive in my computer.

i just have a windows repair disc handy to fix it as it litterally takes about 5 mins

Click to expand...

Yeah I used to have Windows installed on my data HDD but I thought that the HDD would not be causing this, because Windows failed to load off the standard SSD option way before first plugging in the HDD drive?

I've just tried the repair your computer option twice with the Windows disk, but it did not fix the problem Back to using the Windows Boot Manager as the first boot device again now. During both repair attempts the Windows setup disk reported that no problems had been detected with the Boot MGR.

Liam

Well my only guess is, when Windows was installing, it somehow made the boot partition appear as a seperate drive...? Go into Disk Management and see if the 100mb partition is on the SSD, if it is, then it may be the case. A very weird one though...

Funny you should mention Disk Management... I had a look in there a little while ago and I noticed that the reserved 100MB partition on the SSD drive is called "EFI System" I remember when I first re-formatted the SSD after swapping thee board and clicking the new partition button that Windows infact created 3 different partitions (the standard 246GB empty one for Windows itself, the 100MB EFI System Partition & the ordinary 100MB System Reserved Partition) but for some reason, the ordinary 100MB System Reserved Partition is not showing in Disk Management.

Liam

I think I've cracked it... or at least found the root to the problem. I noticed in the BIOS that as well as the ordinary DVD drive as one of boot devices on the list, their was also another DVD drive as a bootable option but this one was name "UEFI DVD Drive" and I think from the very beginning the BIOS automatically loaded this UEFI drive to boot the CD from and that's where it must have started.

30 mins ago I started from scratch once again and disconnected the HDD, but I also disconnected the DVD drive altogether and proceeded to install Windows from my USB stick this time, in the BIOS I set the boot priority device to the SSD only and booted straight into the USB drive via the BIOS bootoveride. Upon Windows setup loading and then getting into the drive options, I deleted all of the 3 partitions originally created in the SSD drive and then selected "new" as usual, but this time I noticed that it only created 2 of them - the standard 246GB partition & the original 100MB System Reserve partiton!

I then proceeded to onto Windows installing and finishing, each restart it booted Windows off the SSD without a problem and finally when I got to the desktop and checked the Disk Management, the 2 partitions Windows created were indeed the primary Windows 246GB partition & the 100MB System Reserve partition.

I've decided to start once again but this time install Windows via the DVD and only load the setup via the original "DVD Drive" boot option and not selecting the UEFI one. As of finishing this post Windows has successfully installed again onto the SSD and is booting via the SAMSUNGSSD830 boot option in the BIOS exactly as it should have done from the very beginning.

What a blooming hectic evening this has been...

Liam