Encountered the "press F2 or Del" splash—possibly incorrect UEFI settings.
Encountered the "press F2 or Del" splash—possibly incorrect UEFI settings.
At startup, my machine displays the UEFI splash screen asking to press F2 or Del to enter BIOS settings. It then freezes. Trying F2 or Del doesn’t resolve the issue. However, using Ctrl+Alt+Del initiates a restart, indicating the keyboard is connected and the firmware is registering input. Likely reason: During attempts to adjust rEFInd (the bootloader), I mistakenly used bcdedit in Windows 10 to set an incorrect manager path. After rebooting, the system remains stuck in this state. The command executed was: bcdedit /set "{bootmgr}" path "/EFI/refind/shimx64.efi /EFI/refind/refind_x64.efi". I suspect the wrong path value is contributing to the problem, though it may not be critical. Experiments I’ve done include resetting CMOS—lights turned back on, BIOS settings returned—but nothing changed. Other actions tried: turning off CMOS, holding F2/Del during boot, unplugging USB devices, using multiple ports for the keyboard, inserting bootable media, creating a FAT32 USB drive with a BIOS CAP file via ASUS utility. Despite these efforts, the screen stays on F2 prompt. My understanding is that a faulty bootmgr entry in the EFI partition on my SSD is blocking both startup and access to settings. It might be loading the boot options as part of the menu, preventing a clean mount or fix. Perhaps running bcdedit or efibootmgr to overwrite the incorrect path would help. If anyone has insights or solutions for: getting the system to boot into another OS, forcing entry into firmware, or flashing a new BIOS version, I’d appreciate it. Also, if someone with deep knowledge of EFI could clarify why this is failing, that would be valuable. If this persists, I’d prefer to learn something constructive instead of repeating these steps. System specs: ASUS ROG strix x570-i gaming Ryzen 5900x, Kingston HyperX Fury RGB 32GB (2x16).
It seems you're likely working with an SFF system and a GPU riser. If you have a GPU riser, it might be a Gen 3 model but configured for Gen 4—make sure the BIOS is updated to Gen 4. Other possibilities aren't ruled out, but this appears to be a common setup.
I am indeed using a riser, but the system was running as configured (hardware-wise) earlier today. And has been for months now. So before the CMOS clear the BIOS settings for the riser should've been correct. While I can't inspect the settings currently to validate that after the CMOS clear they still work, I have CMOS cleared this system in the past without problems. I have not updated the firmware version since I last did a CMOS clear that worked fine, so I would've expected that to behave. FWIW there is output to the display (the splash screen) and the VGA indicator on the motherboard does no stay on after POST, indicating a display output was found by the firmware and is in use.