I'm reinstalling Windows 11 on a new Crucial P310 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD after my previous drive failed. The motherboard detects the SSD, and Windows Setup appears to complete normally from a USB installer. However, after the required restart, the system returns to BIOS and the SSD is not listed as a bootable device. The drive was formatted before installation. The system uses a Gigabyte X870 Gaming WiFi 6 motherboard with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Radeon 9070 XT, and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance memory. The BIOS is updated to version F14c. I've already tried changing Secure Boot settings and confirming the SSD is detected.
3 Answers
If the normal installer finishes without an obvious error but no boot entry appears, use a clean UEFI installation approach that explicitly selects the NVMe disk and creates the EFI and recovery partitions. A command-line installation script can also show whether bcdboot or bcdedit fails while registering the boot files. Be very careful to select the correct disk, since cleaning it will erase its contents.
The important thing is whether the installer created an EFI System Partition on the NVMe drive and registered Windows Boot Manager. In Disk Management, the Windows drive should normally show an EFI/System partition in addition to the main data partition. If it only shows a basic data partition, Setup may have placed the boot files on another disk or failed to create them on the NVMe drive. Reinstall with other internal drives disconnected, boot the installer explicitly in UEFI mode, delete every partition on the target SSD, and let Setup recreate the GPT layout automatically.
The NVMe drive only shows as a basic data partition, while another drive has the Boot and Page File labels. That makes me wonder whether the boot files were created on the wrong disk.
Check that the firmware is set to pure UEFI boot mode rather than Legacy or CSM. Windows 11 needs a proper EFI boot setup. Also look under Secure Boot and try restoring the factory/default keys, then reboot and check whether Windows Boot Manager appears as a boot option.
CSM is already disabled. I also reset the Secure Boot keys to the factory defaults, but the machine still returns to BIOS. I tried both enabling and disabling Secure Boot.
I tried an unattended installation method and confirmed the correct SSD was selected. The installation completed successfully, but the system still would not boot from it afterward.