Hey everyone, I made a really big mistake while trying to enable secure boot on my ASUS motherboard. Now, my system won't find a boot device at all. I genuinely don't think my SSD is damaged since everything was working fine before. I declared my setup dead around 19:00 BST. I'm also shopping for a budget AM4 motherboard, and just want to confirm that all components should work properly and boot into Windows without any problems, right? Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated! I can't believe I messed up this badly.
3 Answers
Yeah, you’ll likely need to convert to a UEFI partition first before turning on secure boot. Make sure to disable secure boot and legacy boot to get back into your system. Those settings often interfere, and enabling one disables the other by default.
When you enable secure boot, your Windows installation has to be UEFI-capable and use a GPT partition. If your setup is an MBR partition instead, that could be why it won’t boot. Try turning off secure boot for now, and you should be able to boot back up.
I tried that, but it still doesn't work.
This is good advice. You can convert MBR to GPT without reinstalling, but always back up your data before attempting it. Check out the MBR2GPT tool from Microsoft!
I’ve handled this issue a few times. First, reset your BIOS completely and switch to the default profile. Then set your OS SSD as the primary boot device to try to boot into Windows again. After that, head to your Windows settings: go to Windows Update > Advanced options > Recovery > Advanced options and select the UEFI option. That should let you enable secure boot again—just save and restart after that.
Sounds good! I’ll give it a shot once I can boot into Windows. Thanks!
Okay, I'll see what I can do once I put the CMOS battery back in.