Help! PC boots into "plug in bootable device" at certain times and others it is fine, motherboard BIOS switches between 2 versions randomly, and I'm worried

[omaroao]

Hello all.

This isn’t the hugest deal however it does happen to me randomly and I thought that I would finally have an attempt at fixing it.

So flashback to 4 months ago, I had bought new parts for my PC:

• New Motherboard - Gigabyte x570 Aorus Master
• New CPU - Ryzen 7 3800X
• New GPU - RTX 2080 Super
• New RAM - Corsair 3200MHz RAM

I’ve built multiple PCs before so I was familiar with the whole process, however, I had the Windows installation on an SSD that I was planning on replacing so I wanted to transfer the Windows installation to an NVMe. I used the EaseUS utility to transfer the data and then tried to boot, but it wouldn’t so I had to do a clean install of Windows onto my machine. No big deal , installed and wiped the SSD.

After I installed, I configured my BIOS, the XMP, and other settings, updated drivers, etc… No issues when my PC is running – at least nothing noticeable.

The issues are as follows:

1. Sometimes when I restart my PC, it boots up into a black screen that prompts to “Please insert boot device and restart computer”. To get around it when this happens I boot into BIOS and choose my boot drive, this usually works ----- but

2. My boot drivers also include “Windows Boot Manager” and at times I have to boot into the boot manager for my PC to boot (as per the issue above). So it doesn’t only show my hard drives but also that Windows Boot Manager, but given that I only have 1 instance of any OS on my PC, I am unsure why this would show up at all.

3. The Motherboard BIOS; When I had everything up and running I updated the BIOS to F11, and this was very welcome cuz then I could turn off that awful PCH fan, however, when I restart my PC and I go into BIOS it randomly switches between versions F4 (default when I got the motherboard) and F11(the update). I know there is also a new version F20, but I’m worried about updating before fixing these issues.

Any advice would be welcome, particularly if you could advise on where I can even begin troubleshooting. It isn’t affecting that much, but it would at least put my worries at ease.

Thanks,

O

[FurryJackman]

Switch your BIOS select to single BIOS mode (see how to do that in the manual, you do that with 2 hardware switches) and select the BIOS chip you flashed F11 onto. The other issue is because you’re booting into CSM. You need to disable CSM.

[zlynx]

It does sound like your board is detecting a boot failure, blaming it on the new BIOS version and trying to boot with the old BIOS. Not a good sign.

One thing I’ve seen in the past that resulted in weird problems booting from NVMe was a BCLK overclock. Make certain that nothing you did or XMP did raised the BCLK past 100 MHz.

Some GPUs are apparently OK with boosted BCLKs but NVMe drives seem to universally break, in weird ways too. Mine would fail to boot at all, or report massive data corruption errors and then bluescreen or kernel panic.