X79 E4 Stuck in endless loop (won't boot after SSD install)

[Haru]

I'm at a loss for explaining this. I installed two SSD's tonight, one as a boot (C) and the other as D. I moved my old WD Blacks to E and F. I ran a fresh install of Windows (7x64) and everything seemed to go ok. However, after the OS was installed the second SSD was not showing, so I went to Disk Management and formatted it as MBR simple volume and rebooted. Unfortunately, that's the last I've seen of the desktop as all the boot process does now is clear the UEFI then I get some gibberish on the screen along with instructions that I need to create a 1.4MB floppy (how quaint) of a RAID driver for XP. (???) No matter what I do after that, the computer simply restarts and goes back through the process again (and again...ad infinitum).

How do I get out of this morass?

[parsec]

Re: X79 E4 Stuck in endless loop (won't boot after SSD install)

So you installed Window 7 with all the drives connected to the PC? That will cause the MBR for the OS to be put on a drive other than the C drive, clearly your second SSD, the D drive. If you did not initialize the D SSD before the OS installation, it won't be seen by Windows, but formatting it removed the OS's MBR, which leaves you with no boot. An irritating quirk of Windows 7 (and Win 8) but fairly well known.

Insert your Win 7 installation media, boot to it, and run a Repair, but first at least remove power from all the other drives besides the C drive. If the UEFI is being "cleared" or I assume forcing you to go into it, that means a setting is wrong somewhere, or is related to the weird error message you get.

[Haru]

Re: X79 E4 Stuck in endless loop (won't boot after SSD install)

So you installed Window 7 with all the drives connected to the PC? That will cause the MBR for the OS to be put on a drive other than the C drive, clearly your second SSD, the D drive. If you did not initialize the D SSD before the OS installation, it won't be seen by Windows, but formatting it removed the OS's MBR, which leaves you with no boot. An irritating quirk of Windows 7 (and Win 8) but fairly well known.

Insert your Win 7 installation media, boot to it, and run a Repair, but first at least remove power from all the other drives besides the C drive. If the UEFI is being "cleared" or I assume forcing you to go into it, that means a setting is wrong somewhere, or is related to the weird error message you get.

Well...not exactly. :) The OS installed on the correct disk and the UEFI had them in the correct order. It was booting fine until I formatted the second disk, then it went nuts. I was finally able to work around the problem by holding down F11 (instead of F2) and choosing the OS SSD (which was odd as it was at the top of the list anyway--go figure). That click allowed the boot to continue and once finished, I reloaded the RSTe driver from the ASRock disc and voila, no more problems.

Like I said, I have no explanation for why it behaved as it did, but all is well that ends well.