You finally upgrade your motherboard and processor, but you can’t boot.
In fact, you can’t even see your harddrive in the BIOS or the OS installer.
What the heck is going on?
Well, the explanation gets hairy… But thankfully, there are two solutions, and one of them is pretty simple!
If you have an 11th generation or newer Intel processor, your system might be using Intel VMD.
VMD, or Volume Management Device, is a server-ish bit of technology where your processor more or less “hijacks” the management of NVMe disk drives in your puter.
When VMD is enabled, you MUST use Intel’s RST drivers – even just to do a clean install of Windows 11.
Well, what happens if you got your puter and it’s using VMD, but you want to remove it?
Easy!
On the one hand, NVMe drives are blazingly fast. On the other hand, getting them to work with Windows – or even your BIOS – can be a bit of a nightmare.
I recently upgraded several computers that had SATA SSDs. I wanted to upgrade each one to an NVMe drive.
So, I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager and just copied the SATA C: to the new NVMe drive, upgraded the hardware in each puter, and then tried to boot: NO DICE!
Windows 10 kept giving me a blue screen at boot with the message: INACESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.
Worse yet, it seemed the BIOS/UEFI wouldn’t even detect the NVMe drive properly. WTH?!
So there you are, minding your own business.
You try to restart your Windows 10 puter, and you end up with the new Sad Face Blue Screen of Death!
At the bottom of the screen, you see:
Stop Code: 0xc000021a
No matter what you do (like the automatic Startup Repair), you appear to be sunk… Windows just won’t boot up anymore.
What to do?
Many of you have installed Windows 10 on your puters only to discover that every time you boot up, you get a screen that reads: Choose an operating system
Windows 10 will of course be at the top of the list, usually followed by either Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. If you pick Windows 10, it fires up and everything works normally.
Obviously, there is still something wrong: Why is Windows 10 asking if you want to boot your old version of Windows? After all, you upgraded, right?
Fear not! There’s a very easy trick to remove this boot menu – and it works for all flavors and versions of Windows all the way back to Vista at least…
You know the drill: You get a new motherboard. You upgrade. And then the fun begins!
Sometimes, one device or another in your system is not detected properly. Other times, you can’t boot into Windows.
You may even find that you can’t even get into the BIOS after the initial setup… Instead, you are met with a blank screen with a blinking white cursor, and pressing Del or F2 does nothing!
In some cases, these problems can indicate a defective motherboard or other component. But before you go RMA-ing anything, try changing the following settings in your UEFI BIOS…
Recent Comments