Motherboard intermittently won't detect SSDs

Motherboard - ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming

So 2 years ago I bought this board for a budget gaming system, and the system had a 1 TB WD Blue drive as the OS drive, and a 2 TB WD Blue drive for storage.

A year later I decided to buy a Samsung 860 Evo 500 GB as an upgrade. I was able to shrink the volume on the 1 TB to clone the OS to the SSD.

The SSD ran fine for about 6 months then the motherboard would boot, and the system would freeze after it being on for 20 minutes. After a restart, the system didn't see the drive anymore, and it would no longer work on any other system.

I bought a WD blue 1 TB SSD, ran that for 2 months, and the board would intermittently lose connection to the system, so I installed a Samsung 970 Evo plus, and I installed it in both slots on the motherboard, and the board sees the drive, but if I try to Install Windows to it, it says it's write protected. I installed it in my x470 pro and it worked first try.

I swapped out the power supply, since it had a 450w, and installed a 650w that I know works fine, and after installing that, the board would no longer see any SSD I would install on it.

I went online to download the latest BIOS, 4602, and flashed it, and the system would lock up at the splash screen. If I unplugged all hard drives, it would still freeze. I was able to get into the BIOS, but I would have to clear the CMOS first.

The motherboard wouldn't let me revert back to BIOS revision 3103, as it says that it's not a compatible BIOS, but was able to flash to 4402. It was able to let me boot into the old 1 TB WD Blue HDD, but still won't recognize any SSDs, or if it does see it, it's only for a short time.

I replaced the board with an older Crosshair VI Hero Wifi that is working just fine with the other SSDs and detects them, except the 860 EVO that is now dead.

I'm thinking that the B450 f gaming board is bricked. Any thoughts?

Hi,

I would try to flash it again without any drives connected, then use the reset jumper to clear the bios completely and give it another try.

There could be a small possibility that the SATA controller has been permanently damaged by the failed drive. But I think there was a miss flash because of the defective SSD...

Also visually inspect the motherboard for any Discoloration, Component leaks, Popping Capacitors, Corrosion, fine black dust, burned smell etc.

Thanks for your reply.

I'm looking at the board and there doesn't appear to be anything that looks damaged. There was some dust on the chokes up by the VRM, but I lightly blew the dust off with compressed air.

I will reflash the board this afternoon with no drives connected to it. But yes I do agree, I think the 860 Evo may have done something to the Chipset, thus damaging the controller.

However, now that I think about it, the top m.2 slot is controlled by the CPU, so technically it would be separate from the Sata controller, and I couldn't install windows on the nvme drive connected to either m.2 slot.

I'll update once I know more

So bad news

So I tried to flash the BIOS to the latest "4602" with just the CPU, and memory installed. After I flashed it, I was able to get into Windows Setup and started to install a clean version of Windows on the SSD. Once it got to 57% complete, the system froze. I rebooted, and the SSD was no longer detected in BIOS.

I installed a different SSD "WD Blue drive" and it completed the installation, but upon restart, the motherboard freezes at the BIOS splash screen. it would not get passed the splash screen even after multiple reboots, or by draining all the power from the board and powering back on.

I was however able to get back into BIOS, but had to clear the CMOS, and revert back to version 4402 BIOS

After that, the system posted and finished installing Windows, but would not detect SSD after reboot.

Tried an NVME drive again, and still it's saying that the drive is inaccessible, even though it works on another computer just fine.

I installed an old ASUS Crosshair VI Hero Wifi board, and got the system back up and running.

Something must have happened to the board, and I just can't figure it out.

Are your boot able drives Legacy-MBR or UEFI-GPT?
How to Post a Screenshot of Disk Management

You should try to install Win 10 as UEFI on the NVMe.

CSM is disabled in BIOS, so they should boot as UEFI

Hey guys

I figured out what happened to the motherboard

Found out that the problem is not the motherboard.

I changed out the motherboard and Installed the same CPU, RAM and SSD.

I first changed to a Crosshair VI Hero Wifi motherboard. The board would work for maybe 3 hours, but would immediately crash with code error 8. Tried everything but couldn't get the board to stay stable.

Lots of people said the Crosshair VI Hero Wifi board was junk, so I bought a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro Wifi, and guess what, same problem. The CPU and RAM light would flash indicating a CPU error.

I've done lots of RAM error testing, ram memtest for 4 hours, stress tested the CPU for 4 hours, and all would pass, but never had any errors.

Well, I decided to run memtest overnight, and I got up 3 times throughout the night to check it, and the computer crashed about 6 hours into the test. I didn't see any memory errors before that either.

I tested both RAM sticks one at a time, and the system crashed after 20 minutes with one of the sticks, and 2 hours with the other stick.

I took the RAM sticks out of my backup system, same exact memory kit, and guess what, the system has been up and running for a week with no issues.

I decided to check the B450-F gaming board again with the different memory sticks, and the system crashed. I got into the BIOS and updated to the latest 4602 BIOS. Now the board is working like it should.

I never thought that a RAM issue would cause a problem like this.