Hello everyone,
I bought myself a new computer a little over a week ago. While the assembly went almost without any issues, I can’t seem to finish the Windows installation on my primary M.2 disk—or even boot from it. After spending countless hours troubleshooting over several days, I’m at a complete loss and need some help. Here’s a quick rundown of my specs:
- Motherboard: Asus TUF Gaming B650M-Plus Wifi
- CPU: Ryzen 9 7900
- GPU: Asus GeForce RTX 4070 Dual Evo OC
- Memory: Corsair Vengeance 2 x 16GB DDR5
- Primary Storage: Samsung 980 Pro NVMe M.2 (the disk I’m trying to install Windows on)
- Secondary Storage: Kingston KC3000 M.2 4TB
For troubleshooting, I’ve removed the GPU, secondary storage, and one of the RAM sticks to create the cleanest possible setup with minimal interference.
Summary of the issue:
I’m experiencing a recurring loop during the Windows installation on my Samsung 980 Pro NVMe drive. Although the installation starts and even writes some files to the disk, every time the system restarts, it does not resume the installation. Instead, it starts from scratch because it boots from the USB. If I remove the USB drive during the restart, the system boots directly into the BIOS without continuing the installation.
Additionally, the installer repeatedly asks for a driver at the beginning of the installation. Even when I use the latest RAID driver from ASUS, it claims that the driver isn’t supported by my hardware. (The installation does proceed if I disable the filter that hides unsupported drivers and manually select the RAID controller driver.) The Samsung disk worked perfectly as a secondary storage device in my previous computer, and both the short and extended self-tests run via BIOS on the Samsung 980 Pro show no issues. The disk appears in the BIOS everywhere except in the list of bootable devices, so I do not think it's a problem with the disk it self.
I have tried installing Windows with the disk in both the M.2_1 and M.2_2 slots, using three different BIOS versions (3072, 3201 – Beta, and 3208 – Beta), and with installation media made directly from Microsoft (for both Windows 10 and Windows 11) as well as media created with Rufus (to bypass the TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot demand for Win11). Additionally, I’ve tried different versions of the SATA driver, cleaned the disk with DiskPart and reset BIOS settings to default multiple times, performed a CMOS reset, and experimented with various BIOS boot settings (including disabling Fast Boot and NVMe RAID), but nothing seems to help. Enabling CSM does actually make disk to show up in the boot list, but when I choose it I immediately get a BIOS error telling me to use a supported bootable device or media.
It’s worth noting that each time I restart the installation, the Samsung drive shows about 10GB less space, indicating that some installation files are being written before the restart.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, because I have cleaned out Google for any answers!
Thanks in advance.
