Z87 Sabertooth - Not booting past BIOS

[jamusson]

Hi all, unfortunately my first post here is for some help/ideas, any of which would be greatly appreciated...

I just put together a new gaming rig, but have hit a wall: my z87 will boot into BIOS, but will not boot further. I've got a new and empty hdd in, which is loaded in the boot menu and correctly recognized. I have tried booting from live USB stick OS installs, which I have never really had a problem with, but which never load/initialize. The USB stick is properly recognized and present in the boot menu, but will not initialize. I've also tried initiating the OS install from a USB external DVD (no optical drive in this machine), but nothing but a blank screen and then the system loads into the BIOS. I've taken the hdd, installed Win7 x64 (and x86) onto it with two other machines, verified that the installs were good, and when I try to load it up with my current build, it hangs, blinks a cursor, and then boots into the BIOS again. I've tried the 1007 BIOS revision as well as the 1405, and tried as many different settings in between as I could to account for things like UEFI, secure boot, USB and SATA settings, and so forth. All of my other components seem to be in fine working order, and I have no problem changing DRAM settings and getting accurate reads from the CPU. I'm expecting I'm missing something obvious that's preventing me from happily booting into an OS environment. Like I said, any thoughts or help would be great.

The rest of the build:
Corsair HX850 PSU
G.Skill Sniper 1866-pc3 14900 (4Gx2)
i7-4770k
EVGA GDDR5 2Gb Geforce GTX 660
WDD Blue WD5000AAKX

[Chino]

Welcome to the ROG forums, jamusson.

If you're installing from an USB pendrive, make sure it's connected to a USB 2.0 port. As for your HDD, please verify that you've connected it to the Intel SATA 3 port.

[jamusson]

Yes to both. I have tried the pendrive in all available 2.0 ports, and same for the HDD/SATA ports.

[Chino]

Proceed to download and run one to two cycles of Memtest86+ on your RAM please. There is a guide linked in my signature if you need help running that utility.

[jamusson]

Ran several passes, and 0 errors.

[Flegma]

jamusson wrote:
Ran several passes, and 0 errors.

Do you connected disk at SATA1 port? Do you check PSU watage?

[Chino]

Do this for me.

1. Disconnect your hard drive for now.
2. Load the optimized defaults in the BIOS, save and shutdown your system.
3. Clear your CMOS.
4. Upgrade to the latest BIOS using the EZ Flash Utility.
5. Load the optimized defaults, save and shutdown again.
6. Connect your hard drive and USB pendrive.
7. Go into the BIOS and make sure your hard drive is your Boot Option #1.
8. Under Boot Override, click the USB pendrive.

If all goes well, Windows should start loading files for installation.

[jamusson]

Aha! Thanks! I think this helped me figure out just exactly what was going on. The extractor I was using for my ISOs, unetbootin, was creating faulty bootable USBs disks. I also discovered I had two unhealthy USB pendrives. I also noticed that after clearing the CMOS , installing revisions or resetting defaults in the BIOS, making sure USB support is set to Fully Enabled is crucial. However, I'm still not sure why the HDD and BIOS were giving me issues with the optical DVD USB drive (aside from possible exigent driver issues I wasn't aware of), why other OS installs via other machines didn't boot past BIOS, or why previous attempts at USB installs created on other Win7 OS's, failed to launch. Weird, but at least I have ruled out a faulty piece of hardware as the problem. Thanks for all the help!

[HiVizMan]

If you are planning to do a USB OS disc, simply use the Microsoft USB tool. It is free and it works for all versions of windows OS.