A puzzling issue - need help to understand

I managed to trash my hd's and cannot understand why it happened.

First the background.

I am running XP, Win 7 & 8 all on separate drives. The m'board is an ASUS M5 A97 EVO.

I had been having problems with Explorer in Win 8 and read that updating the BIOS might help. So downloaded the latest version and installed it. Afterwards the O/S would not load, nor any of the others.

I did have AXTM installed but that could not find the image since it was on an internal drive.

My main image program is Active@ so tried to restore from an external drive. Although it installed it, it would not boot to O/S. Then tried earlier versions and also the XP & Win 8. Did these with and without the MBR but no success.

Tried an earlier version of the BIOS but no luck.

Tried to repair with the Win 7 disk. Although it went through the process it still would not boot.

The only option left was a complete install of Win 7 which worked.

Presumably the MBR was damaged in some way but I would appreciate so help in understanding what went wrong.

Thanks

 

Hl David,

probably when you upgraded the firmware you enabled the secureboot feature that will allow an OS to load only from a gpt/uefi disk. Check your bios settings.

Panagiotis

 

Also, I think Win7 usually needs a special partition to boot : you didn't erase it by chance ? There are indeed 2 partitions, one, a small one, required for boot and the other one containing the OS. I have read here on Wilder's there is a way to merge those 2 partitions but this is an elaborate process (for me at least), the guidelines are somewhere on TerabyteUnlimited.com support area.

Anyway, this may be something to check also.

 

Hi - thanks for replying.

That does make sense in fact I was thinking that it might have been converted to a dynamic disk but that is not the case.

I have been through the BIOS and the manual but cannot find any reference to Secure Boot, although from what I have read on the web it would appear to have that facility. But again I cannot find any reference to accessing it.

So I am still puzzled - any thoughts welcome

 

Thanks - I don't think that updating the BIOS would do that, but worth a thought.

 

Depending on the reason stated for Windows not starting, I'd check that the BIOS options are all set correctly (controller mode, BIOS mode, memory settings, etc.). Sometimes they get changed or corrupted when updating. On one of my systems I have to reconfigure the RAID because it always clears it.

Without details, it sounds to me like the controller mode was changed.

 

Thanks

Not sure what I can tell you.

I had another look through the BIOS and cannot find anything that refers to the controller. There was an option to change from AHCI to IDE. Don't see why I would have changed that but in any case it boots in both modes.