I'm reinstalling Windows 11 on a new Crucial P310 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD after my previous drive failed. The Gigabyte X870 Gaming WiFi 6 motherboard detects the SSD in BIOS, and Windows Setup completes normally from a USB installer. However, after the required restart, the system returns to BIOS and the NVMe drive does not appear as a bootable option. The drive was formatted during setup. My system has a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Radeon 9070 XT, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance memory, and BIOS version F14c. CSM is currently disabled, and I have also tried resetting the Secure Boot keys and toggling Secure Boot settings. In Disk Management, the new drive appears to contain only a basic data partition, while another drive shows the Boot, Page File, and Crash Dump markers. Could the EFI boot partition or UEFI configuration be missing?
3 Answers
The first things to verify are that the firmware is set to pure UEFI mode and that CSM or Legacy boot is disabled. Windows 11 needs an EFI System Partition, and Secure Boot may also need its default keys restored. After changing those settings, check the boot menu for a Windows Boot Manager entry rather than selecting the raw NVMe drive.
The partition layout strongly suggests Setup may not have created the EFI boot partition on the NVMe drive. A proper UEFI installation normally creates an EFI System Partition, a Microsoft Reserved partition, the main Windows partition, and a recovery partition. During a clean install, disconnect any other internal drives, boot the installer explicitly in UEFI mode, delete every partition on the target NVMe drive, and install to the resulting unallocated space. That prevents Windows from placing the boot files on a different disk.
The NVMe drive only shows as a basic data partition, while another disk has the Boot and Page File markers. I’m going to retry with the other drives disconnected so the installer has to create the boot files on the NVMe.
If a normal reinstall still fails, use the Windows installer’s repair command prompt to rebuild the boot files. In DiskPart, identify the NVMe disk and its Windows and EFI partitions, assign the EFI partition a temporary drive letter, then run bcdboot against the Windows folder using the UEFI firmware option. The important part is confirming that the EFI partition is on the new SSD, not on the USB installer or an old drive. An automated partitioning script can also expose errors from bcdboot more clearly, but a clean UEFI install with all other drives removed is usually simpler.
CSM is disabled, and I reset the Secure Boot keys to the factory defaults, but the system still returns to BIOS after restarting. I also tried enabling and disabling Secure Boot.