Morning all! Another request for assistance with one of the witchcraft-imbued systems I appear to be skilled at putting together... Have a backup machine with a P5K Deluxe and a QX6700 with the hard disk removed (all previously working). Needed to use it so added a Crucial MX500 disk for a fresh install, stuck the Windows USB in the back panel, faffed about trying to get the right monitor lead in, at which point the Windows installation screen appeared. SSD not listed for install though. Rebooted, checked BIOS, disk recognised, changed to AHCI, rebooted, "drive not installed or media missing". No amount of boot device selection works, boot from USB option not listed in BIOS (don't know if it was before), CDs not recognised in drive (including retail originals), BIOS reset but no change. Managed to get a Win 8 disc to get past the logo but then it stops with a STOP error code regarding "this usually happens when removable media has changed" or something similar. Note this wasn't a BSOD, just an error message on the Win 8 turquoise pre-installation screen. Even tried sneakily swapping the Win 7 disc into the drive to see if it took over but it didn't. I have no idea why a) the original installation screen appeared instead of options or errors when booting from USB, b) why select discs are now not recognised, c) why hardware is now not recognised/erroneous or d) why booting from USB worked once but is now not an option in either BIOS or boot selection menu. Mayday!
Have you checked if the USB boots on another device, is the SSD recognised if BIOS disk configuration is set to PATA or Legacy rather than AHCI?
I've changed the cables and ports, but can always try that again. It's a 7 iso on USB, but I've since read that the old BIOS on the P5K might be looking for a different format. It has been a bootable stick before, but that may have been on newer boards (can't remember which ones it's worked on). Regardless, though, the CD should still work, which confuses things. It has booted before on multiple other devices; only issue now is that the spares I have to test it on separately are native USB3 only, which research suggests is yet another issue. Win7 installer doesn't have USB3 native drivers, so I now have to manually fudge those onto the stick. The SSD has always been recognised in the BIOS, just not in the Win setup (the first time at least - since then, I can't get the setup to run). I'm going to try the USB3 driver fudge and then the CD drive again and then get cross and pull everything apart and go from scratch. This stuff really, really annoys me - when a build works fine, change one thing and then all other things fail. I've re-TIMmed a CPU once, only to have to do a major driver rebuild once the system rebooted. Unbelievable.
I found W7 to be like this when I was building a while ago. I found having the mobo cd in the cd drive when booting allowed it to load the drivers is needed. ( well thats my take on it!)
