unable to boot with new motherboard

jumpstylerz

Hey icrontic.
I recently installed a new sabertooth z77 into my system and I have been unable to boot since. This isn't the first upgrade I've done but its the first one I've had problems with. Every time I try to boot it gets to the loading screen and logo, then flashes with a BSoD for about half a second and restarts. I've run a repair install but still to no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cliff_Forster

How many hard drives to you have? How are they configured to boot? SSD at all? Set to IDE or AHCI? Have you tried setting the BIOS to "failsafe defaults"?

jumpstylerz

Cliff_Forster said:

How many hard drives to you have? How are they configured to boot? SSD at all? Set to IDE or AHCI? Have you tried setting the BIOS to "failsafe defaults"?

I have 2 SATA drives, both HDD and I have tried booting with only my main drive being plugged in as well as having both in

Cliff_Forster

To simplify things that is where I'd start, just remove the storage drive and try to boot from the OS drive alone, assuming your not trying to RAID them or anything like that? Try looking for a setting that says load to failsafe defaults or something like it, try to tweek that in the BIOS and boot. Do you have any external devices plugged in besides your mouse and keyboard? If so, go ahead and unplug those and try. If that's not the case, I'd be looking at my RAM voltages and timings in the BIOS and comparing it to my RAM spec.

jumpstylerz

As I said in the op, I tried taking out the data drive. No external devices other than kb&m. I'll give a look at tweaking the bios and get back to you

just tried with optimized defaults and still nothing. Here is what happens when I try to boot

AlexDeGruven

Is the SATA Port set as AHCI or Legacy? If it was one way on the old system, and another way on the new one, you will never get a successful boot.

jumpstylerz

I'm not sure, how do I check. My old board was the Asus P8H67-M

Cliff_Forster

That's a modern board too. Default is normally legacy, but you could of configured the drive for AHCI. Try switching that setting in the BIOS under the drive. It won't make anything worse, but I have a feeling Alex may have it, may have confirgured the drive one way on the old system, and on the new the defaults are another.

jumpstylerz

Thank you both so so much. Turns out the ports default to AHCI on this board, changed them to IDE/Legacy now it boots like a charm

Cliff_Forster

And on a spinning HDD, don't stress yourself out about it, legacy IDE will perform perfectly fine, if you configure an SSD later on, consider setting that port to AHCI.

shwaip

Unless you replaced exactly the same motherboard you will save yourself a lot of headaches by just reinstalling windows

jumpstylerz

Well I have a lot of important files I need so reinstalling windows was out of the question. Not to mention almost a terabyte of games, and with Australia's shity capped internet it would take almost a year just to get the games back

Cliff_Forster

Since you have a 2nd drive, you can move the files you need there tempoarily. In this case you did a repair install already, I believe it's essentially going back over your hardware and installing the proper files for basic functionality. If you go to the mobo website you can usually download and additional drivers you may need, often a driver for USB 3.0 functionality, RAID if you intend to use it, things like that, but if you want to be absolutely certain you have a good fresh clean install, you could move your files to the secondary drive.

jumpstylerz

The problem is though, across both of my drives I have almost 2.5 tb of stuff, my second drive is only a 2tb. If it was less I would have no problems but I have a lot of shit, mostly anime and movies haha

Cliff_Forster

Yeah, that's a boat load of data to move around. If the budget allows at some point, consider an SSD for a boot drive. 60 GB or so makes a great size for a windows boot drive and to install your favorite daily programs, browsers, office software and such. Doing re installs is so much easier when you have your data on the spinners and the OS on a seperate SSD. Totally recomended as a furture upgrade.

jumpstylerz

Yeah, an SSD is on my list, but first I gotta get rid of this i5 2300.

shwaip

If you have that many files you can't afford to lose your first purchase should be an external drive to back up to.

Cliff_Forster

I'm backing up everything I value to cloud services. Given the cap I don't know if that's reasonable for you, but I've found it to give me real peace of mind. For the stuff that matters most to me anyway.

jumpstylerz

The reason why I can't lose them is because of the shear time to get them back, I would need multiple external drives just to fit it on. Also cloud storage I use for all my college work but outside of that its near impossible to use due to slow speeds and caps