A friend of mine recently upgraded his CPU to a 7800x3d and switched over to a B650 Tomahawk motherboard. I built a similar system from scratch with no issues, but he's trying to use his existing SSD and Windows installation. His PC can enter the BIOS and recognizes all the hardware, but the boot warning light on the motherboard lights up and it doesn't seem to attempt to boot into Windows at all. I'm wondering if we need to update the chipset driver once we can get it to boot, or if reinstalling Windows is necessary. Should he try getting the old setup running again to uninstall the previous drivers?
3 Answers
Is he using an OEM version of Windows? Those licenses are usually tied to the original motherboard. When you change the motherboard, Windows often won't boot and might just deactivate the license. It's not guaranteed, but something to consider.
First off, double-check the boot order in the BIOS. You want to make sure Windows Boot Manager is the top priority. Sometimes it can be set incorrectly after a new build.
We did check that and prioritized the SSD. Is there a deeper setting we should look at?
Sometimes the issue could be that Windows is set up with the boot manager on one drive and the OS on another. If that's the case, the best fix is to reinstall Windows with only one drive connected to avoid any confusion.
I've switched motherboards before and it still booted, but then Windows hounded me about getting a new license.