Solved Suddenly stuck in a loop of "reboot and select proper boot device..."

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James39

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Aug 29, 2020
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Hello,
I was just playing some games on my desktop tonight and the game crashed and competently froze, this isnt the issue, this particular game has done this before, i just restarted my pc.

My PC restarts and im met with the "reboot and select proper boot device" screen.

I built my PC with a friend of mine just over 2 years ago, never had a single problem.
When we built it we started it with a free version of windows, i never bothered to purchase windows so im still on that free version if that matters.

PC SPECS:
MSI Pro Series Intel B250 Mother board
Intel i7-7700k
A 1tb HD that the OS is on i believe, along with one ssd
GTX 1070 ti

I tried a bunch of different fixes i found while researching the problem:
Rebooting with defaults in BIOS.
Changing the boot order in BIOS (multiple times/orders)
Ctrl + alt + del on start up.
all of them just end up bringing me back to this screen and nothing works.

I'm not sure what other info you will need so just ask and ill tell you what ever you need to know if i can.

Thanks for reading.
 
Hello James and Welcome to PCHF :)

When you say free version of Windows, are you talking about a trial version or did you upgrade from a previous version of Windows?
 
No i did not upgrade from 7 as we just build the pc from scratch.

If i remember correctly (it was a long time ago) we just downloaded the tool from ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/software-download/windows10 ) onto a usb and switched it over to the hard drive and set it up from there. I never bought a license since as far as i was aware the only restriction were things like personalization which i just got used to. Its never caused any problems so it never bothered me.
 
Small update:

My friend thought maybe my hard drive failed and thats why it wasnt booting properly. I went into bios this morning and it is detecting my hard drive, i also switched my sata cables for my hd and my ssd and both are working fine. My ssd doesnt show up in bios but from googling i found thats not uncommon? The os isnt on that one anyways so i dont know if that would be a problem.

Im still stuck in this reboot loop and dont know what to try anymore. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.
 
jmarket said:
So it is detecting one drive but not the other?

Did you make sure that you have AHCI enabled?
Click to expand...


Yes. If i look under system status in bios it lists my 1TB Western Digital under Sata port1 but all other ports are listed as "not present". (my ssd is in port 2)

I also checked and it is already in AHCI mode.
 
Thanks for the reply.

I just tried with only the os drive and unplugged anything unnecessary (only thing was a drawing tablet) , This didnt work.

My power supply is the EVGA SuperNOVA 650 G3 (650W)

I tried safe mode start up but it still brings me to the reboot screen.
 
James39 said:
Yes. If i look under system status in bios it lists my 1TB Western Digital under Sata port1 but all other ports are listed as "not present". (my ssd is in port 2)
Click to expand...
That suggests a problem with the MB, try restoring the factory default settings in the BIOS to see if that helps.
 
phillpower2 said:
That suggests a problem with the MB, try restoring the factory default settings in the BIOS to see if that helps.
Click to expand...

Alright. I tired the defaults and nothing changed.

I also tried switching both the hard drive and the ssd from SATA ports 1 & 2 into 3 & 4 on the MB. More of the same, and the ssd wasn't detected again.
Still cant get past the reboot screen.

Also a question. Would it be worth trying to reinstall windows 10 on my hard drive and seeing if i can get in? I already have a usb with the reinstall ready.

Thanks for all the help so far.
 
Windows should really be booting from an SSD so if there is data on the SSD that you need I would back it up on another computer and then try clean installing Windows onto the SSD.

NB: Can`t say for sure but you may be having this problem due to you having an unlicensed Windows OS, easiest way to find out would be to boot from Linux to see if you can mount the drives, if you can, you know Windows is the issue but if you still can`t access the drives because they are undetected then you know that it is the MB that is at fault.
 
phillpower2 said:
NB: Can`t say for sure but you may be having this problem due to you having an unlicensed Windows OS, easiest way to find out would be to boot from Linux to see if you can mount the drives, if you can, you know Windows is the issue but if you still can`t access the drives because they are undetected then you know that it is the MB that is at fault.
Click to expand...


Ok. I created a bootable USB running Linux mint using a tutorial i found. It booted up and i'm on the pc now. The drive that showed up in bios is listed here, but it is "unable to mount location" like you mentioned. It lists the usb that has linux on it, but once again the SSD is not here.

I assume this means it's likely the motherboard thats causing it?
 
If Mint is unable to mount the HDD that suggests that the drive could have issues, suggest that you connect the SSD to the port that the HDD is presently connected to, if when you reboot Mint can mount the SSD and access the data you have confirmed that the HDD is bad and so are the other SATA ports on the MB.
 
I tried the SSD in the same port as the HDD, as well as another port and it doesn't show up.

So the HDD shows up no matter the port, but is unmountable. The SSD does not show up when in any of the ports.
 
Not sure how or why it has happened but it looks like your both drives have expired :(

A new or a known good but used HDD or SSD are required for you to see if you can install Windows to it.
 
It appears that the MSI site is working.

Remember to choose the proper BIOS update that is specific to your motherboard and follow the instructions other wise you will have a nice paperweight.

If you provide the complete make and model of the motherboard we can assist.
 
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