Windows 10: SSDs Disappeared from Boot Options

Hi there,My PC has windows installed on a NVMe SSD drive, and was booting from there just fine.I have another NVMe drive I am using just for storage, and I Also have another SSD storage drive , but it's SATA.I had a WD 1T HDD here from an older PC and I Decided to add to my current PC as extra storage. And obviously I have performed a full slow format on this drive, which took over 2 hours to complete. HDD was then completely clean.For a couple of weeks the PC worked as it was working before, booting from the main SSD, and the extra drive HDD just working as storage.A couple of days ago I ha

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Random Disappearing/Reappearing SSD on Boot

Config:

ASUS P8Z68-V Pro/Gen 3
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 480GB SSD
Corsair 850W PSU
2x HD 6950 GPU's

My desktop has a 480GB SSD main drive (OS and games), and two secondary HDD's for media storage.

I have had no issues with this SSD, until I tried to add a second video card to my system, and subsequently had to remove it. After a couple re-installs and finally getting the Crossfire to work, I am still in this broken state.

Symptom:

If I put my computer to sleep, restart, power down, it is a complete gamble as to whether or not the system will see the boot drive. What is consistent, is that after a seemingly random interval, it will eventually see the drive and boot straight to windows.

Troubleshooting Steps:

• Reset Bios
• Removed all other options for bootable devices
• Re-installed Windows
• Updated all OS drivers
• Updated firmware for both the MoBo bios and the SSD.
• Replaced all SATA cables
• Moved to another SATA controller port
• Switched power cables
• SSDLife came back saying the drive is healthy

I am literally out of ideas at this point, and the issue is extremely annoying. Sometimes my boot times are 30 seconds (if it sees the drive) sometimes it's 20 minutes (constant reboots until it sees the drive).

Anyone have any other ideas, or have seen this before?

 

UEFI boot options disappeared from BIOS; now getting reboot and select proper boot device

In short, I need to get the system/BIOS to allow UEFI booting of the SSD.

Computer started up today with default BIOS settings.

• Only SSD 1(Windows boot) and SSD 2 were listed in BIOS; HDD 1 and HDD 2 were not visible
• System would not boot. Gave the 'reboot and select proper boot device' message
• Boot menu has no UEFI/EFI (or Windows Boot Manager) entries anymore

I went into Partition Magic/Gparted and confirmed :

• All drives are still showing
• All drives' data is in tact [EFI volume/partition is still listed (and can be browsed/files accessible)]

Gparted print out (note dev/sda2 apparently that is normal behavior) :

/dev/sda1 (locked) EFI System Partition--Fat32--/media/sda1--100.00mb--46.81MiB--53.19MiB--boot,esp
/dev/sda2 (exclamation mark) Microsoft reserved partition--unknown file system--no mount point--128.00MiB--unused spaced--msftres
/dev/sda3 basic data partition--ntfs--/media/sda3--118.58GiB--70.78GiB--47.80GiB--msftdata
/dev/sda4--ntfs--/media/sda4--450.00MiB--327.71MiB--122.29MiB--hidden,diag



As I am able to boot Windows installation from USB, I tried the standard startup repair. It said it was not able to fix any problems.

Next I tried to repair the EFI with Diskpart in the shell:

• sel vol 1 (note that Diskpart states EFI partition is 'hidden')
• assign letter=z:
• cd /d z:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\
• bootrec /fixboot
• bcdboot c:\Windows /l en-us /s vz /f ALL

It completed all tasks successfully. Unfortunately that did not work.

Other things I have tried :

• Removing CMOS battery and replacing with a new one - my HDD started showing up again after doing this.
• Using the old MBR commands(in hopes it would force the Windows startup repair to recognize and fix a problem)

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd​

• Loaded BIOS 'optimized'/defaults (the system did this already once before, hence why I am in this situation, though doing it manually seemed like an option worth trying. Note that after doing this and restarting the system, HDD's stopped showing again)
• Removed new CMOS battery and left it out of the system for thirty minutes
• Formatted EFI and msftres partitions, then rebuilt the EFI boot records

In summary, am looking to force the BIOS to see the EFI partition on the SSD boot drive, as it is not an option any longer.

 

Disappearing SSD Syndrome

Thank you for the information. I have built a new system, and am struggling with a disappearing SSD.

Q: Do you have any suggestions for dealing with a disappearing SSD that is an M.2 device. That is, it doesn't have separate SATA data and power connection-- just the motherboard slot. I have a Plextor M6e SSD plugged in to the M.2 slot on an ASUS Z97 Deluxe 3.1 MB.

Thank you for any comments.

Regards,

DG