Asus Z68 Boot issues.

InvisiblePrawn · 15 May 2014 at 12:29

Hey guys, bit of a wierd one.

I've been running 8.1 from a Samsung 830 256GB for several months with no issues. Yesterday, it installed some update and I shut down from the login screen without logging on. Now, however, the thing won't boot.

The drive is recognised in BIOS and I can select whatever drive to boot, but when I choose the SSD, which it's been doing automatically for months, all I get is a blinking cursor. Only a hard reset or CTRL/ALT/DEL does anything at this point.

I've tried everything I could think of and a variety of things from various threads. Every combination of RAM, graphics and drives in and out. Cleared CMOS. I know it worked as all the BIOS settings were at defaults. The only thing I haven't done is reseat the CPU as I don't have any TIM around.

The wierdest thing is that it was working yesterday. Nothing has changed, hardware wise. If the SSD had died, it wouldn't be recognised in BIOS, surely? Even if Windows had ballsed up or something, it should still boot to safemode or something, right

The indicator LEDs on the P8Z68-V Gen3 which are supposed to tell you what the problem is light up periodically as normal, then turn off. So it seems like the BIOS doesn't see a problem.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Bluntwrapped · 15 May 2014 at 13:24

Did you accidentally switch your storage from AHCI to IDE or RAID?

If you set this manually when you first built the system and have since done a CMOS reset you'll need to change this back.

InvisiblePrawn · 15 May 2014 at 18:06

Thanks Bluntwrapped. It wasn't working before I cleared CMOS. It was on AHCI before. That's the default setting and it still isn't working.

The wierdness continues. It won't even boot from the bootable partition I used to install 8.1 on an external drive. It gives the same blinking cursor as with the SSD.

At least that suggests (to me, anyway) that the SSD isn't bricked. It's still recognised in the BIOS, same as the external drive, but it just doesn't want to actually boot from anything! If the 8.1 install was broken in some way, it would still boot something, wouldn't it?

I'm out of ideas. I haven't got another boot disk for 8.1 or anything else to try with. There has to be something else wrong. What are the chances of two separate disks being somehow screwed? The board isn't suggesting that there's anything obvious wrong with hardware, either.

EDIT: Just updated BIOS. 3402 -> 3603. Still nothing. I could roll back if neccecary...

wazza300 · 15 May 2014 at 19:22

try booting from the windows disc and do a startup repair,might need to repeat it a few times till it fixes it

InvisiblePrawn · 15 May 2014 at 19:27

wazza300 said:
try booting from the windows disc and do a startup repair,might need to repeat it a few times till it fixes it

That's the thing, trying to boot from the partition on an external drive I used to install 8.1 (don't have a disk of any kind) has the same effect. The drive is read in BIOS, but when I try to boot from it, all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor.

When I boot a random storage drive with no OS on it, I get the "No boot media, try again" message, but booting from an actual boot drive does nothing!

wazza300 · 15 May 2014 at 19:32

tried it in all the usb ports?

if you can get it to enter repair mode you can follow this or try startup repair

http://windows8themes.org/using-bootrec-exe-to-fix-mbr-in-windows-8-master-boot-record.html

I would also unplug the ssd from the power cable from the psu and leave it for 30 minutes then plug back in and try,it could have entered freeze state

its not anything cpu related,its hdd/ssd or a corrupt boot record

also idk if that board has fastboot in the bios? if so disable it as it will knock out any usb ports at startup

InvisiblePrawn · 15 May 2014 at 23:38

After everything that could go wrong going wrong, I finally managed to boot to a repair disk. My external drive wasn't working because apparently you can't boot from a drive with multiple partitions. I ended up making a bootable flash drive and got it going from then.

Your MBR fix then worked, Wazza. Something must have gone awry when I powered off yesterday. So many thanks for your input!

I guess this thread can be closed. Thanks again!