New
#1
BIOS Update - Boot Loader Missing
I am for sure gonna get kicked out of this forum for being so annoying. I hope not, because some of the smartest people I have found are in this great forum.
Anyway, I did something I know was newbie-stupid wrong. I tried the ASUS EZ Update from within Win 7 to update my ASUS Crosshair V Formula BIOS to the newest version which is #1701. I know ASUS touts this as The Way. From my experience, though, it is not - it really screwed things up. I will never do this again, I can assure you!
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System: ASUS Crosshair V Formula with AMD 6-core and 16 GB of DDR-3 RAM; 128 GB SSD, many WDD HDD's.
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So I did things the "right way" - flashed the bios to #1703 with a USB stick. Been there, done that before several times, so no problem.
After doing so, however, and I choose to blame the EZ Update for this problem, I couldn't boot with my Boot Settings as CD/DVD ROM (#1) ---> SSD (#2).
That should be normal boot order. I mean Duh! on that one. But it would not boot, so I naturally thought the Win 7 Boot Loader was corrupted (still might be, dunno).
Anyway, I tried the obvious, ie set the BIOS to optimal defaults (oh and yes, the BIOS had updated properly to #1703). Took a look at the boot order and it was the biggest mess imaginable. Order was scrambled with the SSD way down the list and a bunch of HDD's higher in priority on the boot order list. DVD was way down in the order too. "Windows Boot Manager" was #1
Now here's the kicker: The system will no longer boot unless "Windows Boot Manager" is selected as #1 in the BIOS boot order. Excuse my ignorance but what the heck is Windows Boot Manager. Isn't that the Boot Loader in the MBR on the SSD? And now with "optimized defaults" in the BIOS the SSD is no longer the boot item of choice. In fact, the boot order is a list of all my HDD's (many) and my single SSD - in totally meaningless scrambled order.
Does this problem make any sense to anyone? I have never seen this before. All that I can conclude is that it is a BIOS problem but then Win 7 64 bit Ultimate may be corrupted.
Additional info: Before I set the BIOS (after updating to 1703) to Optimized Defaults, the system would not boot to Win 7 UNLESS the setup disk was in the optical drive. Now ain't that a kick in the buttsky!