Windows 10 won’t boot on a new motherboard

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My Asus Z97 AR motherboard died the other week. It was running Win 10 Pro; I’ve had it for about 6-7 years, consequently it has everything I need, including some old programs that I don’t have disks for.

So I got a new Asus Z790 -P and an i7 with 32 GB of memory. What I did was, using Acr0nis, make a bootable PCIe NMVe M.2 from my SSD in the original machine. (I still have the original SSD; I haven’t tried booting from that as I’d neet to take out the stick drive.) I used the old case, power supply and video card, which are all working fine. I had just gotten a new video card a few months ago.

I got the new motherboard installed and while the BIOS sees the NMVe drive, it won’t boot from it and recommends that I use a Windows install disk to do a repair. I downloaded the current Win 10 using the Media Creation Tool, saved to a USB drive and booted it and chose to repair. Currently, it’s repairing disk errors, But I don’t think that’s going to do anything useful. I suspect it has something to do with the Bios being UEFI.

Is there some way to convert the drive with my bootable Windows files to be recognized by the new motherboard?

I thank anyone in advance for any help you can give.

Paul

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There are a couple of problems with your approach.  The old drive contained the chip set for your old board which was eight generations removed from the new one.  It also sounds as though the old board used a legacy BIOS rather than UEFI and the drive will be in MBR which uses a different partition make up (GPT) than UEFI.  You can convert the drive from MBR to GPT but you have to be able to boot into windows to do this.  There may be other issues as well.  Unfortunately, the recommended course of action when doing such a major upgrade of hardware is a fresh installation of Windows followed by installing the programs you run.  Unless you are running some discontinued programs, you should be able to find downloads for all of them and as long as you have the serial numbers there should not be an issue.

If your Windows repair did not succeed, my suggestion is to format the NVME drive and do a clean Windows install.

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Paul Demmitt

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I suspected as much; that it would require a clean installation. That will be my next step if my restore from the original SSD doesn’t do it. Windows Repair’s correcting disk errors didn’t do anything but give me the same error message on a blue screen: 0xc000007b. Looking that up, it seems it applies more to installing games. Since I can’t even get into Windows, all the suggestions wouldn’t work for me.

My last resort before I do the re-format, clean install, is using Acronis with the new machine to create the bootable NVMe drive. The first one I made was on my laptop which is not the machine the drive is going to boot from. I’m thinking Acronis might have picked up info from the laptop to create the NVMe boot drive. Since I’m now making it with the new motherboard/machine, it might pick up what it needs from the BIOS to make it work. It’s just a thought.

Then I do a start-from-scratch install.

Thank you for your suggestion.

Paul

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Well, the good news is that creating the bootable NVMe on the machine it’s going in with Acronis did the trick! It was the last thing I had to try before starting all over with a clean install.

Thank you agoldhammer for your suggestions and help. I appreciate it.

Paul

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agoldhammer wrote:

There are a couple of problems with your approach.  The old drive contained the chip set for your old board which was eight generations removed from the new one.  It also sounds as though the old board used a legacy BIOS rather than UEFI and the drive will be in MBR which uses a different partition make up (GPT) than UEFI.  You can convert the drive from MBR to GPT but you have to be able to boot into windows to do this.  There may be other issues as well.  Unfortunately, the recommended course of action when doing such a major upgrade of hardware is a fresh installation of Windows followed by installing the programs you run.  Unless you are running some discontinued programs, you should be able to find downloads for all of them and as long as you have the serial numbers there should not be an issue.

If your Windows repair did not succeed, my suggestion is to format the NVME drive and do a clean Windows install.

I’m sorry if this sounds too critical but this is old advice. Since Windows 8, all you need to do is boot the machine in safe mode once. This forces Windows to load all of its storage drivers and if one matches, it should boot fine.

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Paul Demmitt

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Unfortunately, even with the first NVMe boot drive I made, it wouldn’t go into safe mode. I did try that and thanks.

Paul

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It works!

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