Solved! An operating system wasn’t found.

[nwrigley]

I'm building a gaming PC for a friend using mostly surplus parts with a new case and power supply. The OS drive is a M.2 sata ssd that appeared to be new in packaging. I had the system on a bench for testing, installed Windows 10 from a flash drive and everything was great. However, after I moved the system to the case, I started having issues where it wouldn't boot and I would get this message.

The only thing that had changed was moving to a case and also adding a mechanical drive for storage. Tried unplugging the mechanical drive, because I know on this motherboard the m.2 slot shares a lane with some of the SATA ports. Reseated the drive and screw many times and it finally seemed stable again. I figured it was just a finicky m.2 slot. After testing fine on several boots, I took it to my friends house and had the same problem. I already had my backup plan of an m.2 to sata adapter case with me, again figuring it was the finicky seating on this m.2 slot. Moved the drive to the adapter and everything booted fine. However, my friend messages me shortly after that it's doing the same thing again.

So, now I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing, is it the drive itself or something odd with the Windows install? I will sometimes see the drive in the BIOS even when it doesn't boot. Sometimes it will just be seen as the drive, other times it will appear as 3 entries, the drive, a "Windows Boot Manager" entry, and a UEFI entry. At it's worst, it will just be a blank line with no model number.

Motherboard BIOS was updated.

Gigabyte GA-X99-UD5 WIFI
Drive: SM2280S3G2/120G Kingston SSDNow G2 120 GB M.2-2280

 

[Shmee]

I would suspect the drive, or possibly a short.

 

[nwrigley]

I would suspect the drive, or possibly a short.

I was curious about a short as well, but where do you think this could be occurring? It had crossed my mind, because it worked fine on my bench before screwing it down into the slot. There is a wireless module that sits underneath it, but then I thought moving it to the adapter would get around that possibility.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll probably try Windows install on a different drive and go from there. Maybe plug the existing drive into my machine and poke at it, see if what the Kingston utility says, look for firmware update.

 

[nwrigley]

After further testing, all signs point to it being a bad and failing SSD drive.