What went wrong?

[R.A.T. Army *MST3K*]

The PC in question was built roughly two years ago, and has been running with no major issues. I recently decided to upgrade the RAM. Adding two 8GB sticks to the already present two 8GB sticks. I've done this before to other PCs with minimal issues. This time game me a bit more trouble, as the two new sticks would simply not being recognized by the PC.

After a good amount of failed troubleshooting, I thought the issue might be that I had previously enabled DOCP to run the RAM at it's advertised speed; and that putting those settings back to default may help. After setting everything back to default, and rebooting the computer it immediately loaded into the BIOS. I instantly noticed that the boot priority menu was empty. Along with the boot menu. My SSD, and my CD round drive we're still recognized as storage devices, but not as bootable devices.

In the end I ended up enabling the "Launch CSM" option and now the computer boots properly; although it does seem to take about 3-5 seconds longer than normal.

My question is what happened? I had never edited any boot options in the past, so those should have all been left on their default settings. When I saved after setting things back to default, it shows me in a pop up what I changed and what I changed it to. I took a picture of it so I could set everything back, nothing about boot options on it.

How did setting things back to the default settings, completely wipe the boot priority menu?

The Motherboard is an Asus TUF Gaming x570.

[R.A.T. Army *MST3K*]

Ursprungligen skrivet av KyokoKirigiri:

did you tryswapping sticks in different slots just to see if anything changes

Yes, I did try swapping the pairs. Originally the first pair was, and still is in A2 and B2. After swapping them, only slot A1 was recognized. After that I put them back and shortly after was when I went back to default, noticed the boot issue, and prioritized that.

[ZeekAncient]

Well, if enabling CSM allowed you to boot, this is telling me that you are in Legacy BIOS mode.

If you had UEFI BIOS and the partition style of your boot drive was GPT, you would not be able to boot with CSM enabled.

Also, if your partition style is MBR, you would not be able to boot with UEFI BIOS and enable things like Secure Boot. And you would need to enable CSM in order to boot.

The fact that you were not able to boot, and then enabling CSM allowed you to boot, tells me that you have Legacy BIOS and your disk is MBR partition style.

And if you are in Legacy BIOS mode, then your partition style has to be MBR. Now in order to get your BIOS back to UEFI BIOS, you will have to convert your disk from MBR to GPT partition style. Just do some research online, and follow the steps necessary to convert your disk from MBR to GPT, and your BIOS to UEFI.

I have done it before several times. It is quite easy. They do say that you should back up your drives, but I never have when I did this and I never lost any info. It was quite painless.

Just remember that after converting your disk from MBR to GPT, and enabling UEFI in the BIOS, you will need to disable CSM in order for you to boot into Windows.

Just do some research on the whole process and you will see that is quite painless. First though, go into System Information to see what BIOS mode your are in, and go into Disk Management, and disk properties, to see what partition style your volumes are. If you are in Legacy BIOS, and have MBR partition styles for your disks, it might be a good idea to convert them to GPT and UEFI BIOS.

Good luck.

[R.A.T. Army *MST3K*]

I was backing up some files tonight and a question came to mind. Is it possible that my SDD was always set to MBR for whatever reason? I'm seeing all over that the only way to convert any drive from MBR to GPT is to delete all the partitions, which I don't think I can do without losing everything. I've only ever wiped partitions when i was going for clean installs.

Assuming that in my defaulting things in the BIOS, I somehow caused my SDD and even the CD drive to switch to MBR somehow, wouldn't that have had to delete the partition to do so? The USB theumb drive that I am using to back up files is also MBR in the disk management window?

Is it possible I have always been on MBR, and when I hit default setting in the BIOS, is started looking for GPT, as that is the norm? If so, going to GPT may be an unnecessary risk.

[Illusion of Progress]

I thought MBR stopped being supported for drives Windows would install to (could still use it as additional drives) a while back? Or am I mistaken on that? I think the last time I dealt with MBR on a boot drive was Windows XP, maybe once by accident on a Windows 7 system, if that. I thought it wasn't really a thing starting with Windows 8 or 10.

Edit: Have you looked up ways to switch it from MBR to GPT? Apparently there are ways to do this without losing data? I'll also take that opportunity to mention that you should back up anything that isn't something you're willing to lose. Data that exists once, is scratch data and doesn't exist. Data that exists twice, exists once, etc. So if it's for more than the time and effort needed to reinstall and setup Windows, if anything is actually important, back it up before doing such a process.

[emoticorpse]

Ursprungligen skrivet av R.A.T. Army *MST3K*:

I was backing up some files tonight and a question came to mind. Is it possible that my SDD was always set to MBR for whatever reason? I'm seeing all over that the only way to convert any drive from MBR to GPT is to delete all the partitions, which I don't think I can do without losing everything. I've only ever wiped partitions when i was going for clean installs.

Assuming that in my defaulting things in the BIOS, I somehow caused my SDD and even the CD drive to switch to MBR somehow, wouldn't that have had to delete the partition to do so? The USB theumb drive that I am using to back up files is also MBR in the disk management window?

Is it possible I have always been on MBR, and when I hit default setting in the BIOS, is started looking for GPT, as that is the norm? If so, going to GPT may be an unnecessary risk.

Pretty sure that's not true. I used to use Paragon Hard Disk Manager to convert my Windows 10 drive back and forth between GPT and MBR without deleting anything. It was a simple conversion that simply managed to change the partition type back and forth. I'm assuming other programs can do the same t hing.

[R.A.T. Army *MST3K*]

Ursprungligen skrivet av emoticorpse:

Ursprungligen skrivet av R.A.T. Army *MST3K*:

I was backing up some files tonight and a question came to mind. Is it possible that my SDD was always set to MBR for whatever reason? I'm seeing all over that the only way to convert any drive from MBR to GPT is to delete all the partitions, which I don't think I can do without losing everything. I've only ever wiped partitions when i was going for clean installs.

Assuming that in my defaulting things in the BIOS, I somehow caused my SDD and even the CD drive to switch to MBR somehow, wouldn't that have had to delete the partition to do so? The USB theumb drive that I am using to back up files is also MBR in the disk management window?

Is it possible I have always been on MBR, and when I hit default setting in the BIOS, is started looking for GPT, as that is the norm? If so, going to GPT may be an unnecessary risk.

Pretty sure that's not true. I used to use Paragon Hard Disk Manager to convert my Windows 10 drive back and forth between GPT and MBR without deleting anything. It was a simple conversion that simply managed to change the partition type back and forth. I'm assuming other programs can do the same t hing.

Did you use any kind of third-party program to do it? The guides online that I'm finding are I think just Windows 10 based. No third party program involved. But they all mention deleting the partitions; at least the ones I've seen. That includes both the ones linked above.

I'm also starting to wonder how necessary this conversion is. When I've seen, the biggest benefit is that a GPT drive to handle above two terabytes. My SSD is only two terabytes, and I have no plans to add more storage.

[emoticorpse]

Ursprungligen skrivet av R.A.T. Army *MST3K*:

Ursprungligen skrivet av emoticorpse:

Pretty sure that's not true. I used to use Paragon Hard Disk Manager to convert my Windows 10 drive back and forth between GPT and MBR without deleting anything. It was a simple conversion that simply managed to change the partition type back and forth. I'm assuming other programs can do the same t hing.

Did you use any kind of third-party program to do it? The guides online that I'm finding are I think just Windows 10 based. No third party program involved. But they all mention deleting the partitions; at least the ones I've seen. That includes both the ones linked above.

Well I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager to do it yeah. I'm assuming other programs can do it but I didn't use those. I just happened to use Paragon because I happen to use that as my drive clone/backup/restore program and so I just used it to do the partition conversion also.

I would assume there's a good chance some of those other powerful partition manager type programs can do the same thing but not totally sure. Like Partition Wizard or that program from Easus or even AOMEI stuff. Paragon I don't know if they have a free option that does that and the other ones possibly have that function behind a paywall or something.

Also you can consider backing up your drive totally to a location off that drive, then do the convertion/wipe the drive and then restore after the conversion? If I remember correctly that's something like what I was doing. I forgot exactly how it went but I think I did end up doing that (which didn't matter since I'm constantly wiping my drive and restoring my backups anyways).

[ZeekAncient]

Ursprungligen skrivet av R.A.T. Army *MST3K*:

Did you use any kind of third-party program to do it? The guides online that I'm finding are I think just Windows 10 based. No third party program involved. But they all mention deleting the partitions; at least the ones I've seen. That includes both the ones linked above.

I'm also starting to wonder how necessary this conversion is. When I've seen, the biggest benefit is that a GPT drive to handle above two terabytes. My SSD is only two terabytes, and I have no plans to add more storage.

You do not need to delete any partitions, and you will not lose any data converting your boot drive from mbr to gpt.

I have done it several times on different computers, and I never lost any data. It is quite easy, and I was able to convert the disk from MBR to GPT and then have UEFI BIos as opposed to legacy.

Here is a youtube video that explains it. I haven't watched the whole thing, but I am pretty sure he uses the same process I used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wveFOB2TTtc