Boot order and external drive issues

[xenon20]

Hi

I have a gigabyte Z87X-UD3H mobo which seems to be loosing the boot order. Sometimes when I turn on the machine it'll boot straight into windows 7, but other times it says something like "please reboot and select proper boot device".

Currently when this message appears I am going into BIOS and setting the boot order and then saving and exiting which will sort the problem for that boot, or sometimes a couple of boots but then it will loose the config and boot order again. Am I missing something? I am using the latest BIOS version (F7).

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My second issue that I've been having is that sometimes when I boot into windows, my external drive isn't listed in my computer but it shows in the device manager. I keep getting a window pop up saying "you need to format the drive in drive :F before you can use it". Up till now I have been safely removing the hardware and then reconnecting it to get the drive to show up.

I started to think that my external drive had some bad sectors or was on it's last legs. I ran a WD diagnostics extended test last night which passed and said that the SMART status of the drive is fine. Any ideas why the external drive isn't always recognized ?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Xenon

 

[Danny75]

Hi

I have a gigabyte Z87X-UD3H mobo which seems to be loosing the boot order. Sometimes when I turn on the machine it'll boot straight into windows 7, but other times it says something like "please reboot and select proper boot device".

Currently when this message appears I am going into BIOS and setting the boot order and then saving and exiting which will sort the problem for that boot, or sometimes a couple of boots but then it will loose the config and boot order again. Am I missing something? I am using the latest BIOS version (F7).

------

My second issue that I've been having is that sometimes when I boot into windows, my external drive isn't listed in my computer but it shows in the device manager. I keep getting a window pop up saying "you need to format the drive in drive :F before you can use it". Up till now I have been safely removing the hardware and then reconnecting it to get the drive to show up.

I started to think that my external drive had some bad sectors or was on it's last legs. I ran a WD diagnostics extended test last night which passed and said that the SMART status of the drive is fine. Any ideas why the external drive isn't always recognized ?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Xenon

Hi Xenon, around a week ago I upgraded the BIOS of a MSI Z87 Mpower Max mobo to version 1.5, and immediately got the "please reboot and select proper boot device" message upon reboot. Moving the SSD boot drive to just above the CD/DVD optical drive in boot order priority, did the trick. Apparently the new BIOS version prefers it in that order, even though I had to manually change the order. Hope this might help, even if your mobo is different.

Don't know what could be up with the external drive. I'd just re-format it, unless someone knows a better solution.

 

[xenon20]

Hi

Moving the SSD boot drive to just above the CD/DVD optical drive in boot order priority, did the trick.

I did reorder the boot sequence in the BIOS so that my windows SSD was no1 and my cd drive was no2 and then saved and exit. It would boot correctly but then when powering on the machine next time, I would have to go back into the BIOS where it had reordered my cd drive as no1 and my windows SSD as no5 (last). Had a search on google but couldn't find anyone with the same issue.

Chap at work said I should try and remove all the other drives from the boot list but I can't see how to do that in my gigabyte BIOS ? Any idea's how I make the boot list just contain the SSD and the cd drive?

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When I first got the "you need to format the drive in drive :F before you can use it" message, I backed everything up onto another external drive and then formatted the disk as NTFS and then moved all of my data back, and now the problem has re-appeared so I don't think formatting it helped

 

[Danny75]

Hi



I did reorder the boot sequence in the BIOS so that my windows SSD was no1 and my cd drive was no2 and then saved and exit. It would boot correctly but then when powering on the machine next time, I would have to go back into the BIOS where it had reordered my cd drive as no1 and my windows SSD as no5 (last). Had a search on google but couldn't find anyone with the same issue.

Okay, have you tried reverting to a previous BIOS version? And are you doing any overclocking that could cause the BIOS to reset to default automatically if overclocking fails?

Also, disable (Intel) Smart Connect if it is enabled.

Chap at work said I should try and remove all the other drives from the boot list but I can't see how to do that in my gigabyte BIOS ? Any idea's how I make the boot list just contain the SSD and the cd drive?

I don't know. Does the boot priority list contain any "UEFI xxx's"? Those should be left at the top, with the SSD just under them. They may be called differently in the Gigabyte BIOS, not sure.

When I first got the "you need to format the drive in drive :F before you can use it" message, I backed everything up onto another external drive and then formatted the disk as NTFS and then moved all of my data back, and now the problem has re-appeared so I don't think formatting it helped

Oh dear. Well hopefully finding the solution for the mobo/SSD issue may solve this one. What's your SSD by the way?

 

[Danny75]

The following may be worth a try as well:

I am having this problem. Just got a i5-4670k and GA-Z87X-UD3H. Both new from ******. Have two 1TB hard drives and a 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD. All drives worked fine on previous system.

The BIOS only sees the SSD intermittently. I can boot the Win 7 DVD and install windows fine. Once I install the Gigabyte drivers from disk and reboot it fails to load Windows. sits at the "Starting Windows" image for minutes and then blue screens.

Reinstalled Windows again. Same thing. After a Windows first boot after install it runs fine. I can install drivers and download from the Web right after installing drivers.

Randomly when booting I am told it cannot find the Boot manager and the BIOS won't show the SSD. I moved all the sata cables and reseated. My board has F5 BIOS. Though I did download F7 I cannot install it since I cannot install .net 4 and then reboot. Any bout up after the initial install never works.

No clue what the heck is wrong.

UPDATE FIX FOUND: Okay, if you have a Z87 board with more than 6 Sata Ports you may be in luck. The original 6 SATA III ports are Intel based. The extra 2 on my board are Marvel based Sata II. My OCZ Vertex II WILL work properly on the Marvel sockets since they don't follow the tighter Intel Sata III parameters.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers...detecting-ssd-hdd-boot-win-install-disc.html#.