Tong Family

Well, I do have two PCs which I admit I don’t use regularly, but I’ve been pretty lucky with Windows 10 and upgrades. Dave called me because the machine we had built for him (a nice AMD with a fast 1TB SSD) has mysteriously failed Windows 10 updates with long zillion-digit error codes. Then when he tried to clean install Windows 11, for some reason the SSD was not seen by the Windows 11 USB installation and it installed on his slow hard drive.

The strange thing is the BIOS of course sees the SSD and Windows 10 installed on it, so why does Windows 11 not see the SSD? This seems to have something to do with BIOS configuration and its a little suspicious both my brothers and this reporter both have AMD machines.

What a nightmare of trying to figure out what was wrong, the first mysterious thing was that there was now a Windows Boot Manager and it would show him two options for Windows 11 on the slow hard drive and Windows 10 on the SSD, but as soon as it tried to go to Windows 10, the machine would hang.

This is because the modern Windows machine hides the Power on Self Test, but from 30 years ago, I remembered that if you hear a PC beep, it passed the low-level test to get to the BIOS and then it would hide all the error messages. On his ASUS board, you have to spam the F2 key to get to the BIOS and then he was able to boot to Windows 10 again.

Then trying to figure out why Windows 11 could not see the SSD, there is all this stuff about the CSM (some sort of compatibility mode which I’m not sure why a new machine needs) which is the compatibility mode for the “new” UEFI (and yes I’ve forgotten what all this means). You are supposed to turn the CSM off and SecureBoot off (even though I’ve forgotten what that is :-), but still, it does not see the SSD at all. Argh.

Well at least I got him back to the point where he could run the msconfig and in Boot, you can set Windows 10 to be the default boot, but he is not getting any updates.

The internet is pretty useless for this diagnosis and he doesn’t of course want to get rid of his only working Windows 10 installation on the SSD, so we are going to try to buy a new SSD for him and then build a fresh Windows 11 on there. Sigh.

(And yes, we did get him a MacBook which works just fine)

SSD Shopping: Samsung 990 Pro 2TB

So off to find the best SSD, we had previously gotten the Sabrent Rocket 4 which has been working great, and looking at Tom’s Hardware, we see all of these SSDs that run at 7.4GBps with PCIe 4×4:

1. Samsung 990 Pro (2TB is $149 at Amazon). I’ve used lots of its earlier ancestors, it’s a nice premium system. So interestingly the top-rated is the cheapest!
2. WD Black SN850X. ($195 at Amazon). Another brand I’ve seen in the past.
3. Sabrent Rocket 4. ($201 at Amazon). Well, this was a bargain last time around but now the others are looking better.

It’s not a fancy system so doesn’t need PCIe 5 which is potentially even faster.