I just built my first PC, but it won't boot past the BIOS screen. The motherboard's boot indicator was lit, so I changed the boot settings to use CSM, and the light went away. After that, the monitor showed a black screen even though it still detected a signal. The storage drive is blank and doesn't have an operating system installed yet. What should I do to get the PC working?
1 Answer
A blank drive won’t have anything for the motherboard to boot, so the boot light is expected. You need to create a bootable Windows or Linux USB installer on another computer, plug it into the new PC, and select the USB drive as the boot device. For a modern system, use UEFI mode rather than CSM or Legacy mode. You can usually leave Secure Boot enabled for a standard Windows installation, but temporarily disabling it can help if the installer won’t start. Once the operating system is installed, the system should boot from the internal drive.
That makes sense—I didn’t realize the drive needed an operating system before it could boot. I’ll create an installer USB and try starting from that with UEFI enabled.