Restart Problem - No Bootable Drive

P

PAULPARKER78

I rebuilt a Supermicro computer using a used X10DAX, Rev. 1.02 motherboard. I installed a brand new Sabrent Rocket 4.0 1 TB NVMe drive based on their PCIe card. Default sector size is 512 bytes.

In another machine I deleted everything on an older Crucial 64 GB SSD/SATA drive and deleted the volumes so it was unallocated. Then I installed that in the Supermicro machine.

I bought a Windows 10 Pro 64-bit license, download version. Then I made an ISO disc onto a 32 GB USB flash drive (memory stick).

Upon start, I opened up the BIOS. It had the boot mode as dual (Legacy and UEFI). I left it as is to “cover the bases”. I started up the computer and the BIOS saw the USB stick as a bootable drive. I went through the installation smoothly using the Product Key listed in the email from Microsoft, but when it saw the 64 GB SSD, Windows Install said it wanted 157 GB of drive space to install Windows, so that was not enough. So, I choose the NVMe drive and was happy I did not have to clone the operating system, etc. from an SSD/SATA drive to the NVMe/PCIe drive. Everything looked fine.

I proceeded to download drivers (or copy them to a USB drive and put that in another USB port on this machine and copy to the Downloads folder). I installed a video driver (for nVida Quadro M4000), etc.

I checked on Intel’s website for chipset driver updates. There were none.
Free space on the NVMe drive reported as 841 GB out of 931 GB, meaning Windows used 90 GB, supposedly (I have seen articles describing that this is not the whole story).

Since I did not need the 64 GB SSD drive anymore, I shutdown the computer to pull it. I pulled it and the USB drive.

After starting again, I got a message, “Reboot & select proper Boot device or Insert Boot media in a Boot device and press a key”.

I shut it down and went back to the BIOS. I tried the different Boot modes to see what would happen. What I found was that the USB drive was not listed as a choice – because it was no longer present; obvious. It did see the NVMe drive. So, I tried changing the Boot mode to just UEFI mode (thinking that the NVMe drive was UEFI). But then it did not appear as a choice. I tried just Legacy mode, and then the NVMe drive re-appeared as a choice. The CD and DVD drives also appeared as choices, but they had no disc in either.

So, after saving the BIOS with Legacy Boot mode, I started the machine again. Surprisingly, I got the same message about needing to provide bootable media.

This made me think to start all over with the Windows installation after setting the Boot mode to just UEFI prior to beginning a clean install. This way the NVMe drive would be UEFI based instead of Legacy based. (I hope.)

But, before I go through all that, I thought I would check with you folks. What do you think is the problem? Anyone else have this happen? Any known answers?

I appreciate any useful input very much.

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