I've been having a frustrating issue with my PC. It was working fine until it froze while I was watching Netflix. After rebooting, I was greeted with a boot failure screen, and I couldn't do anything until I reset the CMOS battery, which let me access the BIOS. Now, every time I try to boot, I get stuck at the Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Elite X logo. I checked that my SSD is recognized and set Windows Boot Manager as the first in the boot sequence. I've disabled CMS support, enabled SATA connections, and made sure secure boot is set to standard. Despite loading optimized defaults, Windows still won't start. I even tried to repair the boot file using a bootable USB but again, got stuck at the logo screen. I can't even reach the Windows recovery options anymore. I don't think the SSD or USB is the issue, and I've reset the CMOS multiple times. I'm really out of ideas. Can anyone help me get Windows to boot?
1 Answer
It sounds like you're pretty experienced, and it's impressive you've done so much troubleshooting! If you think the SSD is fine, it might be an issue with the boot record itself. If you have access to another SSD, you could temporarily swap it in, install Windows, and then try to connect your original SSD afterward to recover your data. That might help narrow down the problem.
That makes sense, but unfortunately, I don’t have another SSD to try that out. I’m starting to think the motherboard might be the problem, preventing Windows from booting from both the SSD and the USB. Any tips on BIOS settings I could tweak?