AB350M - Gaming 3 motherboard fails to boot USB flash drive using Windows installer tool
AB350M - Gaming 3 motherboard fails to boot USB flash drive using Windows installer tool
I recently returned from my first semester at college and left my tower at home. I planned a complete overhaul of my hard drives and reinstalled Windows 10. I used a 14.5 GB USB flash drive with the Windows Installer tool, but it didn’t boot successfully. The drive appears to work, yet whenever I try to start it via F12 using the Gigabyte BIOS, it loops back to the normal Windows 10 setup. I tested both UEFI and legacy boot settings without success. I also swapped USB ports from 3.0 to 3.1 and then to the standard 2.0 slots on my motherboard, but nothing changed. The drive is formatted with FAT32, and it worked fine on my laptop. Additionally, the "Reset this PC" feature failed because it showed an error: "could not find the recovery environment." I ran the command `reagentc /enable` to try enabling it, but it remains disabled—even though Disk Management lists a 488 MB recovery partition. At this stage, I’m exhausted and unsure how to properly format my computer and drives again to improve performance.
I faced a similar problem too. It was fixed by updating the BIOS two times. Initially, I needed to reach version 31 for better USB support, then installed the 51b edition. This allowed me to configure everything in UEFI mode and successfully booted from USB. When I first attempted to flash the BIOS to the newest release, it reported an error, which is why a second update was necessary.
Did you fix the issue I’m facing? The same problem persists with a brand-new USB created from the media tool—it functions on other PCs/MBs but keeps looping and returning to BIOS on the AB 350. I’m unable to make it bootable, and I’ve tried switching between UEFI legacy CSM ON/OFF without success.