Asus TUF Gaming sudden VGA and boot light appears unexpectedly.
Asus TUF Gaming sudden VGA and boot light appears unexpectedly.
Upon being awakened from sleep, my PC ceased showing any output. Initially, a force restart failed. I attempted several fixes: reinserted the GPU and reconnected power after unplugging the PSU, removed the CMOS battery for ten minutes, shorted the CLRTC pins, booted without peripherals using HDMI, and tried one RAM stick at a time. Eventually, booting without a GPU helped—reinserting it restored progress. However, the PC still couldn’t detect my M.2 SSD as a boot drive. I reset the BIOS to defaults, which brought it back to the same issue. This time, both VGA and Boot lights came on. The GPU workaround only worked for the boot light. I checked BIOS settings and other configurations—CSM enabled, UEFI selected, Secure Boot set to Windows UEFI—and updated the BIOS multiple times. Alongside these changes, I adjusted several SATA, NVMe, and PCIe parameters. I tried repairing the M2 slot using a Windows install drive, but the drive remained unrecognized by the BIOS. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Have you attempted repositioning the CPU and ensuring the cooler isn’t over-tightened? AM5 enjoys quirky problems when mounting isn’t just right. If things go further, try connecting the M.2 to another device if possible, or replace it with a different model. Controllers tend to work well, though occasional failures can occur, leading to issues similar to what you’re experiencing.
It’s unlikely given the PC’s stable performance over several years. I’ll proceed with the second troubleshooting step. Unfortunately, I don’t have a tool to inspect M.2 devices directly. I’ll use a USB enclosure and test it on my laptop. AFAIK the graphics card health check occurs before the boot drive starts. Could a faulty M.2 drive be influencing the graphics card?