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!
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?!
Windows 11 has been here for awhile, but it’s not available to everyone.
There is a list of requirements that are quite confusing – and changing.
What’s worse, certain Win 11 requirements seem like they’re too much trouble to fix. I mean, who wants to risk converting their MBR drive to GPT and borking everything?!
Well, it turns out it’s not that hard – if you have Scottie’s Guide To Making your PC work with Windows 11!!
Let’s say you decide to take the plunge and install Windows 11 on your puter.
You get everything set up, create a bootable USB stick of Windows 11, and fire away…
And then you discover that your SSD is missing! The Win 11 installer can’t see it, and your BIOS can’t see the drive, either!
What gives??
Microsoft can’t seem to get Windows 10 right, and maybe now we know the reason: because they just announced Windows 11!
Coming sometime around the end of this year, Windows 11 promises to be everything Win 10 is not.
There’s only one problem: Everyone is claiming (including MS) that you’ll need a super-modern puter to run it. In this vid, I take a look at Windows 11 and its system requirements. I also review past Windows releases, and how each time, the same thing happened.
In short, YES, your computer will run Windows 11 just fine! Nothing to see here…
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