BIOS Update - Boot Loader Missing

Well, of course I haven't written you off and won't. I will be here to help as long as you would like, and I don't fall to sleep. And also, I am not a student of linguistics, and can barely spell it. I'm no youngster either. I wish. I would absolutely love to hear about your students, but probably not in this thread. We both may be booted off the site. But back to business.

First, These threads are very good. I am sure at some point in history, someone will have the same problem and will find this thread through a search. With any luck they may learn something that will work. My first inclination is there may be a short in your wiring. If jiggling the wire made the board power up, that would be my first inclination. I would fix that first. You will not know if that is the problem later on, if trouble arises.

What I would do is most likely not what I would tell you to do. I do not want to be responsible for bricking your motherboard. If it were mine, I would probably try and if it didn't work, chalk it up to experience and learn something in the process.

So, Since you have the old bios back (that is correct isn't it?) I would recommend the safest, but most time consuming, action. I would completely wipe the drive clean and do a clean install. If you want to pursue that course, I will give you instructions. I will also need to know if you are familar with the command prompt and diskpart. Either way, it will be simple.

That's great news. An SSD is fantastic. I own 6 of them and would never be without one (or 2 ). Your assumptions are correct. Disconnect all hard drives except the SSD. When you have finished the flash, do the disconnecting, change the boot order and I will tell you how I do it so that it will be properly aligned and you will not have the 100MB partition. Just, before you begin, make sure your SSD is connected to port 0 and your sata controller is in AHCI mode. And there is little for you to worry about. I'll try to make it as simple as possible. Is the SSD new or is there a previous OS installed on it?

Are we there yet? Or are we taking Christmas night off. I wouldn't blame you, sounds as though you need a rest.

I think this is pretty relevant to this thread for anyone that comes across this thread in the future UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) - Install Windows 7 with

Hi guys. I've been lurking on this thread but I was unable to respond due to holiday madness.

Could you (OP) confirm for me the following timeline? I pieced this together from your posts but I want to be sure I understand this correctly. Please correct any errors in this timeline.

• First, you installed a new, clean installation of W7 onto a blank SSD. (And, you aligned the SSD)
• After the installation Windows started and ran normally.
• Then you updated your BIOS using EZ Update from within Windows. The BIOS updated successfully.
• After this update the system no longer started normally. You had to have the W7 installation disk in the optical drive to start Windows.
• You then updated the BIOS again, this time using the USB method from within BIOS.
• After this update you experienced an error: "Missing Boot Loader".
• You then loaded the Optimized Defaults" in BIOS.
• After this you discovered the Boot Order was scrambled, and you first noticed that the "Windows Boot Manager" was first in the boot list.
• You then removed all the HDDs except for the SSD and the optical drive. This is when you first got the "Remove Disks...." error message and the system would not start.
• You reconnected the other drives and the error message went away and Windows would start.

Q1: When you installed W7 fresh, did you have all other hard disk drives disconnected?


Q2: During the course of the problems after updating the BIOS, did the system always start and get to the point where it tries to start Windows (it completed the Boot routine)?


It would be very helpful if we could see your Disk Management window, expanded so we can see all the information on every drive in the top and bottom sections of the window.


It would also be important to know if what the file table format of all the drives is - MBR format or GPT format - particularly the SDD.
You can get that info with this procedure here:
Hard Drive - GPT or MBR



My gut guess is that this problem has something to do with scrambled Windows boot files located on multiple drives and complicated by a UEFI system environment. That "Remove Disks..." error occurs when Windows boot files are missing or corrupted (Error message when you start your computer with a non-system disk). The fact that it occurs when one of the other drives is disconnected is a key clue, I believe.
If I am correct then your UEFI (BIOS) is only remotely involved.

Lets see what things look like.

TVeblen, welcome to the party. I did have those thoughts myself, But I didn't believe the bios update had anything to do with the start up problem. I assumed it was the installation. From what little I know about the UEFI boot, the install has to be done in UEFI mode and the only way to change it is a clean install.... either way. I'm glad we have an expert on UEFI here.

Expert!! That's funny.

I'm thinking the same as you. But I suspect there is more going on then has been reported so far or that we understand. We need more information.

What I know:
In a pure UEFI system a GPT file table is required and an "EFI System Partition" (ESP) is created on the "primary" hard drive (usually 100MB and invisible to Windows) along with another (usually 100MB) "Windows System Reserved" partition (WSR) - (visible in Windows). The ESP contains the files needed by the UEFI to boot the machine. The WSR contains the files needed to boot Windows.

Here is what I don't know:
What happens if the ESP is installed on a different drive (other then the intended primary drive)?
What happens if the ESP and Windows System Reserved partitions are on different drives?
What happens if the ESP, Windows System Reserved partitions , and the OS files are on different drives?
What happens if you were to update the UEFI if any one of these conditions existed?

Just a working hypothesis. Given everything you have checked with him and the comparisons to your system settings it is the only thing that makes sense (to me).
We need more info from the OP me thinks.