HCHTech
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 3,982
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
Had a Win7 workstation from one of my bigger business customers in this weekend. It's a 2-year old custom build, Asus MB, AMD FX 8350 @ 4GHz, 16GB RAM, and an AMD Firepro V4900 Video Card with a gig of video memory. Pretty snappy for it's day. Client reports that after rebooting after a windows update on Friday, he was greeted with the message to "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device".
I removed the hard drive to backup the data, ran full hardware tests on the desktop and ran the drive through a long test with gSmartControl on my Linux box. All results are happy. I put it back together and take a look through the BIOS, everything looked ok, but I loaded the defaults anyway. Still no joy. Booting from a Win7 DVD would not let me get into the repair options - "This version of recovery console is not compatible with your version of Windows". Hmmm. I try a different Win7 Pro disk, same answer.
This is an architecture firm and they run a dozen or so LOB apps, including the full Adobe suite - I wasn't looking forward to reinstalling all of those on Monday, so just in case, I set the hard disk aside, put in a fresh disk and reinstalled Windows. All went without problems, I loaded the system drivers, and hit up Windows updates for the final 30 or so updates not included in my image. During this process, I must have rebooted a half-dozen times or so. The last of the updates load, I reboot one last time and - I'm greeted with the same damned "Reboot and select proper boot device" message. So that's how my weekend is going to go, huh?
I take the thing apart again and switch the SATA port the hard drive is plugged into, it still won't boot but for some reason this time it will let me get into recovery console when booting from a Windows disk. Now we're getting somewhere. I check to make sure the disk is active (it is), I try to rebuild the boot record, but get the "No windows installations found".
Ok, so I reimage the disk and start over, more carefully this time. After the install but before I load any updates, I reboot a half dozen times, no problem. I load the system drivers, no problem. I check BIOS again, everything looks ok. I check the version, it's the latest one. So I load the updates again, doing a handful at a time this time, all seems ok, rebooting after each set. I get down to the last couple, and and back comes the error. Same as before, I can't get into the repair options if I boot from a Windows disk.
Grasping at straws now, I download the latest BIOS file from ASUS, and install it (it's the same version already installed, but whatever). On reboot, I'm looking through the BIOS settings and see that secure boot is now enabled. Asus is a little funny about how you turn that off, but I do that and the darn thing boots right up like it oughta. I hold my breath now, install the original hard disk that it was dropped off with, and sure enough it works. My pride is a little wounded, but at least now I don't have to spend all day Monday installing software with the client breathing down my neck.
So...near as I can figure, there was a corruption or something in the BIOS, that was somehow triggered by one of the latest Windows updates? That doesn't make any sense, but it fits the fact pattern.
I removed the hard drive to backup the data, ran full hardware tests on the desktop and ran the drive through a long test with gSmartControl on my Linux box. All results are happy. I put it back together and take a look through the BIOS, everything looked ok, but I loaded the defaults anyway. Still no joy. Booting from a Win7 DVD would not let me get into the repair options - "This version of recovery console is not compatible with your version of Windows". Hmmm. I try a different Win7 Pro disk, same answer.
This is an architecture firm and they run a dozen or so LOB apps, including the full Adobe suite - I wasn't looking forward to reinstalling all of those on Monday, so just in case, I set the hard disk aside, put in a fresh disk and reinstalled Windows. All went without problems, I loaded the system drivers, and hit up Windows updates for the final 30 or so updates not included in my image. During this process, I must have rebooted a half-dozen times or so. The last of the updates load, I reboot one last time and - I'm greeted with the same damned "Reboot and select proper boot device" message. So that's how my weekend is going to go, huh?
I take the thing apart again and switch the SATA port the hard drive is plugged into, it still won't boot but for some reason this time it will let me get into recovery console when booting from a Windows disk. Now we're getting somewhere. I check to make sure the disk is active (it is), I try to rebuild the boot record, but get the "No windows installations found".
Ok, so I reimage the disk and start over, more carefully this time. After the install but before I load any updates, I reboot a half dozen times, no problem. I load the system drivers, no problem. I check BIOS again, everything looks ok. I check the version, it's the latest one. So I load the updates again, doing a handful at a time this time, all seems ok, rebooting after each set. I get down to the last couple, and and back comes the error. Same as before, I can't get into the repair options if I boot from a Windows disk.
Grasping at straws now, I download the latest BIOS file from ASUS, and install it (it's the same version already installed, but whatever). On reboot, I'm looking through the BIOS settings and see that secure boot is now enabled. Asus is a little funny about how you turn that off, but I do that and the darn thing boots right up like it oughta. I hold my breath now, install the original hard disk that it was dropped off with, and sure enough it works. My pride is a little wounded, but at least now I don't have to spend all day Monday installing software with the client breathing down my neck.
So...near as I can figure, there was a corruption or something in the BIOS, that was somehow triggered by one of the latest Windows updates? That doesn't make any sense, but it fits the fact pattern.
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