Intel Motherboards : Z87E-ITX boot screen frozen after mSATA partition

Author: Jessie
Subject: Z87E-ITX boot screen frozen after mSATA partition
Posted: 23 Oct 2016 at 8:44pm

parsec wrote: It seems you ruined something on the mSATA drive (that we now know was an OS drive) when you tried to "... change the mSATA drive partition". You'll need to describe what change the partition means. It now sounds like you have remnants of an OS installation on the mSATA drive that Windows uses to attempt to boot, but it fails. But that is only one possibility. Whatever happened from changing the partition, the Windows installation seems to be corrupted.

Windows was installed on the first partition.
Steam was installed on the second partition.
I just tried to wipe the Steam partition without touching the first partition.
But something must have gone wrong.

parsec wrote: If the mSATA drive was quick formatted, or cleaned using the diskpart command, and still acted as you describe, then my guess would be that drive failed for some reason. If you can boot from your Windows installation media, with only the mSATA drive in the PC, try to repair it. If that fails, your only other option is deleting the remaining partitions, and then use it for whatever you need.

I cannot do anything as long as the mSATA drive is connected. So I especially cannot format/clean/repair it.
And I don't have a spare motherboard to try it on another system.

It's written here that:

You may have a corrupted boot sector but a correctly working SSD. Some BIOSses do not handle that very well.

I think that is what is happening here. But as I don't have any way to test the mSATA drive (which is out of warranty), we'll never know.
The other possibility is of course that the mSATA drive is completely broken. But I find that strange that a repartitioning can utterly break a drive like that.