Ok so after messing with it and messing it with it I had amazon send me a new board just in case, and also bought a wireless USB so I could at least update everything and continue with installing programs etc. I don't know if this holds true with the wireless card that comes WITH the motherboard, but i had left my laptop wifi card in that combo ii piece. In this myst of tryin to find that combo ii install guide that i don't see stickied anywhere. 😕 I started doing windows updates. Now the broadcom wifi card I had left in there popped up with an update through windows. So I let it go, and low and behold it started working. I'm going to throw in the stock wifi card that came with it, and see if there was some random windows 7 update that fixed that problem. Maybe it's a windows issue and not a mobo issue?
I also started having some odd issues with the computer wanting to lock up at the login screen. So I tried a bunch of stuff, and could get into safe mode just fine. Since there wasn't a LOT done to it, and all the different wifi drivers partially being installed along with other random stuff that wasn't working quite right I blew it away, and went to re-install windows 7.
So I get to the screen where you can format, delete, expand partitions, etc. and I deleted the partition, and format it. Only to notice there's a little note towards the bottom of the window stating
"Windows can not be installed on this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting this disk. Ensure the disk's controller is enabled in the computers BIOS menu."
So I exit the installer, and naturally went into the BIOS only to discover none of my drives were showing up anymore... Decided to grab the manual just to double check and make sure those were the correct hdd slots. They worked, but it was the ASMedia Seral ATA that I had plugged everthing into. I read up on the differences and seen ASMedia was slower and tried to combine USB/SATA down the same channels or something along those lines. Stopped reading about that and swapped the drives over to the other SATA which is an Intel controller. After swapping the drives over checked in the BIOS and everything was showing up again. Loaded the windows 7 disc up again only this time no message or errors. Installed just fine.
Got to the windows updates after installing my USB wifi due to the device manager not being able to intall the native wifi that came with it. updated everything and the broadcom wifi showed up and installed and started working again. All of drivers I've installed went without a hiccup. So maybe try the Intel Disk Controller slots (below the sticker advising slot 5 will be diabled when using NSFF SSD). Seems to run faster as well... and I'm still using old school platter drives ATM. So I figured I'd post up what I did regarding that Combo II issue since I could never find that stickied thread... 😕