ASUS Maximum XII can't boot to boot drive after Macrium restore

disabled fast boot.
what do i lose by resetting the cmos (and thanks for the instructions)? What do i gain?

rboris said:

disabled fast boot.
what do i lose by resetting the cmos (and thanks for the instructions)? What do i gain?

You will lose any custom settings that you have made in BIOS. It will not affect anything on any of the installed drives. There might be boot configuration data stored in the CMOS that is still from the old system before the restore. CMOS reset might erase that information and force the BIOS to reload it from the EFI System Partition. On my laptop and desktop any time that I do anything that affects the EFI system partition, my computers reset themselves to booting from my restore partitions and I have to into BIOS and manually set the correct EFI system partition as first in boot order again. You don't have custom restore partitions set up like I do, so CMOS reset would accomplish basically the same thing.

rboris, if you launch the boot menu (F?) you see two options to boot from the M.2 NVMe.
Witch one are you choosing to be able to boot into windows?

Under BIOS you have a boot priority list of drives. Witch one is your first option?

i have switched these options around since early this morning. no combination works.

"straight" M2.NVMe or "Windows" M.2.NVMe.

I also reset the cmos.

Fewer boot choices.

No better.

Can't figure this out.

Nor can my good colleagues on this forum who are trying so hard to help me.

rboris said:

"straight" M2.NVMe or "Windows" M.2.NVMe.

Don't you have a Sabrent "Windows boot loader"?


How did boot into windows?

Under BIOS you have a boot priority list of drives. Witch one is your first option?

yes, the Sabrent is the first drive in the boot loader configuration.

You're not paying attention to my questions and your answers are inconclusive. I don't know what you're referring to.

lets start again: two questions and I need two answers

1) if you launch the boot menu (F?) you see two options to boot from the M.2 NVMe.
Witch one are you choosing to be able to boot into windows?

2) Under BIOS you have a boot priority list of drives. Witch one is your first option?

So, I see a few options to go forward:

1. Wipe the entire NVMe SSD and do a clean install of Windows 10 to it. See if that will boot from the SSD. If it does, then you restore ONLY the C: drive Windows partition to replace the newly installed Windows partition.

2. Delete the existing EFI System Partition on the NVMe SSD and recreate it.

3. Create an EFI System Partition on one of the SATA SSDs and boot the computer from there.

Option 3 would be almost guaranteed to work and would be a good troubleshooting tool and it would leave your current Windows install on the NVMe SSD intact.

Option 1, I would give a 50/50 chance of working, it is time consuming, and it will erase your current Windows 10 installation and rely upon restoring a backup image. The problem is that you currently can boot from the NVMe if you select it manually, so I am not sure how this would fix that.

I really don't think Option 2 will work, because you are booting from the NVMe, you just have to select it manually. But it is a fairly easy thing to try.