Difficulty Booting Past BIOS Splash Screen

[babelmh13]

Windows 10 and up to date. For the last week, I hit the power button on my pc and it wont boost past the spinning circles on my BIOS splash screen.

My OS is on my NVME m.2 card on my mobo.

If I shut the power off, and disconnect my hot swap SATA drives (2) HDDs, (1) SDD then turn it back on, the BIOS splash will be spinning for 3-5 minutes, then begin the automatic startup repair diagnostic and bring up the troubleshooting blue screen, then I can get it to restart and boot.

If I shut it off and dont plug my SATA drives back in, the OS will boot, but it still takes a few minutes on the BIOS splash screen. If I power off, plug the drives back in and boot, it will sometimes still boot, but not the next day. If I leave them plugged in and statup the next day, I have to unplug them, startup repair, and boot with just the m.2 doing the whole process again.

I've rolled back to system restore points prior to these issues but no luck. Changed boot priority setting in the BIOS, no luck. Ive also booted in safe mode, run chkdsk,sfc scan now, flushed dns with no luck. I havent tried replacing all my SATA cables, but since the OS is booting slowly with just the m.2 connected I'm not sure that will do anything, and I dont have spares handy.

Thoughts..?

 

[Axman]

First thing that comes to mind is that if you have any kind of fast boot enabled, turn it off. And then turn off any boot screens and put it in diagnostic boot.

 

[babelmh13]

First thing that comes to mind is that if you have any kind of fast boot enabled, turn it off. And then turn off any boot screens and put it in diagnostic boot.

I did make sure fast boot didnt suddenly enable itself somehow. It is disabled. Also checked for a bios firmware update, as well as all my disks and they are all up to date

 

[Axman]

Have you tried disconnecting all the drives and booting off a thumb drive?

 

[babelmh13]

Have you tried disconnecting all the drives and booting off a thumb drive?

I have disconnected all drives and booted off the M.2 that my OS is on. But i have not pulled that off the MOBO and tried booting from a USB

 

[babelmh13]

TTT

 

[Axman]

Have you tried a repair install? Also chkdsk.

 

[babelmh13]

Yup, tried both, no luck

 

[Eulogy]

I mean, "no luck" doesn't really tell us anything. What are the _results_ of a disk scan and sfc? What happens when you boot a liveCD? Have you done a new install on a new SSD (or any disk, really) and see what that behavior is? There's a lot of troubleshooting 101 missing here.

 

[babelmh13]

I have gotten my pc to boot consistently (at least for the last couple of hours). Only Drive I have connected at this time is my M.2. Ran CHDSK which has found no errors, here are the results of my scans. If there is something I should search for in the log file of my sfc scan I am happy to look, but I figured I wouldn't post the whole thing, unless someone is willing to read through it. Also, this sfc scan found corrupt files, which the last couple times i ran it were not found.

 

[babelmh13]

Update:
I ordered a powered SATA 3 to USB adapter so that I could plug my two hard disk drives into my computer as an external hard drive, and both HDDs opened up and read perfectly fine. So its not a hardware issue with my HDDs.

That leaves only two options as I see it.
1. There is a BIOS setting that is stopping the drives from being recognized (I can't even get them to show up in the boot options anymore). Though I didn't change any settings that I can recall.
2. The SATA board in my case is either not receiving power, or not reading data (I have four 3.5" hot swap bays).

My case is a Corsair 800D, and my MOBO is an Asus Z390-a.

Are there any power settings in windows or the BIOS related to the drives that I should check that I'm not thinking of..?

 

[Furious_Styles]

Update:
I ordered a powered SATA 3 to USB adapter so that I could plug my two hard disk drives into my computer as an external hard drive, and both HDDs opened up and read perfectly fine. So its not a hardware issue with my HDDs.

That leaves only two options as I see it.
1. There is a BIOS setting that is stopping the drives from being recognized (I can't even get them to show up in the boot options anymore). Though I didn't change any settings that I can recall.
2. The SATA board in my case is either not receiving power, or not reading data (I have four 3.5" hot swap bays).

My case is a Corsair 800D, and my MOBO is an Asus Z390-a.

Are there any power settings in windows or the BIOS related to the drives that I should check that I'm not thinking of..?

Not that I can think of. Using the NVME usually disables a SATA port. Boot option should be set to UEFI with CSM disabled.

 

[pendragon1]

have you tried disconnecting the hotswap bay?

 

[babelmh13]

have you tried disconnecting the hotswap bay?

So since I got the

Not that I can think of. Using the NVME usually disables a SATA port. Boot option should be set to UEFI with CSM disabled.

I do have boot set to UEFI, but I believe I have Launch CSM ENABLED. Thats how it always was before when everything was working, but I will try disabling that this afternoon.

 

[babelmh13]

have you tried disconnecting the hotswap bay?

So actually, given that I couldnt get the drives spinning on power up, the other day i tried disconnecting the SATA power cable from the hot swap board, and connected the SATA adapter I bought to the hot swap board, powering the board from a wall outlet (which isnt a great idea but I had to try). I was able to get the drive connected to sata 3 to read and be recognized by the BIOS and boot up. I then disconnected the adapter power and reconnected the SATA power cable connected to my power supply, and now I am getting that HDD in the SATA 3 port to boot consistently. Im not sure why exactly that worked, but am still having trouble getting the other HDDs to read in SATA ports 4,5, and 6.. For the record, i am not connecting to ports 1& 2 for my other drives, just 3,4,5,6

I was thinking of taking the HDD thats reading in SATA port 3 out, and connecting the other drive that isnt reading to that port to hopefully get it to read, then swap them back and plug the drive into port 4 hopefully to get them both recognized at the same time.

I suppose I could just lay all my HDDs out, and connect the SATA power cable connected to my PSU (which has 4 SATA power connectors) to each drive, and connect the SATA data cables directly from the MOBO to the drives and see if that works. It was going to be my next diagnostic step, I just havent had the time yet.

 

[babelmh13]

So actually, given that I couldnt get the drives spinning on power up, the other day i tried disconnecting the SATA power cable from the hot swap board, and connected the SATA adapter I bought to the hot swap board, powering the board from a wall outlet (which isnt a great idea but I had to try). I was able to get the drive connected to sata 3 to read and be recognized by the BIOS and boot up. I then disconnected the adapter power and reconnected the SATA power cable connected to my power supply, and now I am getting that HDD in the SATA 3 port to boot consistently. Im not sure why exactly that worked, but am still having trouble getting the other HDDs to read in SATA ports 4,5, and 6.. For the record, i am not connecting to ports 1& 2 for my other drives, just 3,4,5,6

I was thinking of taking the HDD thats reading in SATA port 3 out, and connecting the other drive that isnt reading to that port to hopefully get it to read, then swap them back and plug the drive into port 4 hopefully to get them both recognized at the same time.

I suppose I could just lay all my HDDs out, and connect the SATA power cable connected to my PSU (which has 4 SATA power connectors) to each drive, and connect the SATA data cables directly from the MOBO to the drives and see if that works. It was going to be my next diagnostic step, I just havent had the time yet.

Update:
I took all of my storage drives out of the case and connected them directly to the SATA cables on the MOBO and connected each to SATA power cables from my PSU.

Doing this, I was able to get all of my drives recognized by the BIOS and boot to windows quickly and all worked great. When I reconnected everything back to the hot swap board in the case, I still was only able to get the HDD connected to SATA port 3 to recognize.

My suspicion is that my hot swap board may have some sort of damage, but there is a small chance that in trying to fix the issue for the last month, I changed one of my BIOS settings relating to power configuration or something else that may be preventing the MOBO from reading more than one drive connected to my hot swap board in the case...