Hello,
I'm having problems, whenever I have a GPT drive connected to any port. The BIOS seems to try to boot up the EFI partition (which right now should be a clean FAT32 partition) before loading Setup, if I press F2 (or even if I toggle the Back 2 BIOS button), but after showing all the standard POST information (VGA BIOS, POST Splash Screen - with the hotkeys BEING shown, RAID BIOS), also overriding any options I may have set for boot order, and giving me a pretty ugly "A bootable device has not been detected" prompt.
The only way I've managed to get to Setup or to a Boot Menu was by unplugging the GPT drive from the board, which renders me uncapable of doing any actual maintenance on the actual boot loader problem, even if I could boot Ubuntu from a LiveCD/USB or Windows Recovery Environment.
I had been running this system without a problem ever since I had assembled it, around one year ago. I have my drive setup as follows:
256GB SSD on Port 0
1TB SATA2 on Port 1
1TB SATA2 on Port 2 (in RAID 0 with the previous one)
1.5TB SATA3 on Port 3
DVD-RAM on Port 4
nothing on Port 5
After a long time running fine on only Windows in UEFI, I decided to install Ubuntu with it on the SSD. After many unsuccessful attempts to boot back to Windows (I was able to boot up Ubuntu), I tried to mess with the EFI files manually, as it seemed like GRUB had changed some of Windows' files there. All I did was append ".grb" to GRUB's "bootx64.efi" and rename "bkpbootx64.efi" under /EFI/Boot and /EFI/Microsoft, in order to see if I could restore Windows' original bootloader, in place of GRUB, and if this way it could boot back up, and then I couldn't even get to the BIOS setup before Windows Boot Loader shows up (and this still has the same problem as before). At this moment, if I tried "Startup Recovery", it showed up a "Windows is loading files..." progress bar, and then went back to the same boot loader screen. If I tried "Startup Windows Normally", it showed "Starting Windows" for a brief moment, then showed the same "Windows is loading files..." progress and finally, left me back at whatever screen I was BEFORE the Windows Boot Loader - if I came from GRUB, it would take me to GRUB again - I could repeat the process indefinitely without rebooting; strangely, if I came straight from the One-Time Boot Menu, it would also take me back to it, but this time without any Optical Drives listed.
After only getting success on reaching BIOS Setup by unplugging the SSD itself, I've took it out, reformatted the EFI partition, and now all I get is the doomed "A bootable device has not been detected", even if I have a bootable USB device, or a bootable CD - which are both set to boot before the Hard Drives.
The SSD is the only GPT drive, all the other ones I've maintained as MBR drives.
The system specs are:
Intel DX79TO Mainboard
Intel Core i7 3930K
Markvision 4GB DDR3-1600 in Quad Channel (16GB total)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX295 (on first PCI-E slot)
Corsair 750W PSU
Has anyone got any idea on what I could try?
Thanks in advance...