I'm having a major issue with my PC getting stuck in a bootloop for the past two days. Here are my specs: Asus B550M Plus Gaming WiFi motherboard, Ryzen 5800X CPU, 64GB of DDR4 RAM (4x16GB), an MSI 4070 Ti GPU, two 1TB Samsung SSDs, and a 1TB Generic SSD. I recently added a brand new 1TB Samsung NVMe SSD with a heatsink as well.
The problem started when my PC restarted while I was watching something. Since then, it's been in a bootloop. I've tried fresh installations of Windows several times, but it either loops mid-install or shortly after. I removed the CMOS battery and reseated the GPU, but nothing worked. After giving up, I installed the new Samsung NVMe in a different M.2 slot after removing the old SSD.
I've formatted the drives, ran CHKDSK, and tried installing Windows multiple times. Once, it seemed stable, but it couldn't detect my GPU, despite reseating it multiple times. Other times, I got the bootloop again while installing the GeForce drivers. I tested the RAM in BIOS, all healthy, and the SSDs are fine. I don't have an onboard GPU, but UI rendering works okay, and it was detected by Ubuntu Live. Sometimes I could only access the system in safe mode.
I've used various bootable USB drives created with Windows Media Creation, Rufus, and Balena, but I keep running into the same issues. Can anyone help me out?
1 Answer
It sounds like you're running into a classic boot partition issue. If you have more than one M.2 drive, it can confuse the system when it tries to find the Windows boot files. The M.2 slots might also affect your GPU performance. My advice would be to use the BIOS M.2 formatter on all your M.2 drives to wipe them—this is important to clear any lingering boot partitions. After formatting, remove any non-boot drives and just leave one during the Windows installation. This way, Windows won't get confused about which drive to boot from. Once it’s successfully installed, you can reconnect the others and ensure the system is booting from the correct drive.
Could you clarify what the BIOS M.2 formatter is? I couldn’t find anything for my motherboard, and I did remove the old SSD to use the new one, which was formatted during the Windows install. Is there a way to check for these Windows boot partitions while in safe mode? It would be easier than pulling out the SSDs again.