Had a damn near heart attack and did some much put off maintenance on my system today. Last night it failed to boot and I was at a complete loss as to why.

I had added in an M.2 onboard PCIEx drive (256 on a chip instead of in an SSD SATA drive) a while back for my foray into Windows 10 — really just needed an excuse to get something newer and faster. I’ve hit my SATA drive limit for the board since the very beginning, and having one less dedicated to an active drive was a nice thought.

It worked after learning quite a bit about M.2 and detaching all the other drives on the system which magically had Windows boot loader on it. It’s been really great… until this latest build.

I’m not sure what happened, but even after a bios reset the bootcodes for “safeboot” appeared to still be intact in the bios, so possibly Windows 10 itself messed them up and couldn’t come up with them in order to boot properly.

In short, I turned off safeboot and it came right up.

Unfortuantely my propensity to troubleshoot left to a complete rebuilding. A complete rebuilding without removing the engine block, I suppose would be more accurate. I pulled out my video cards, all the power cords (modular) drives and cleaned house. I literally cleaned, and also pulled out the molex power and put in another SATA one that I had to dig out of a box in the garage.

I now have all the drives set up as they should, no molex to SATA power adapters and such inbetween, removed extra cables, attached the fans to the motherboard connectors for active fan management and removed as many of the other excuses for molex as I could. It ended up looking quite nice, as nice as an oversized box full o hardware can look, I suppose.

having reset the bios also meant I went through all the settings again, and made sure everything was working optimally (like the RAM settings off of XMP profile) to get the max out of everything. Apparently I hadn’t set the switch which allowed the system to modulate the multiplier and voltage automatically, so I wasn’t actually running on my turbo like I should have been. Sidenote: it’s weird that turbo is back. Last time I remember turbo was with my 386 being able to go from 33mhz to 66mhz

So here I am on the maiden voyage of a newly optimized system. I’m about to try to hop into GTA V to drive my new car. This was the last week of the holloween specials so I sold a few cars i don’t use as well as a property to make up the difference needed. No way was I going to buy a “cash card” and pay real money for a car to use in online. I did want a herse however, so now I can go drive it!