I received a message saying: An operating system wasn't found, please unplug anything without one.
I received a message saying: An operating system wasn't found, please unplug anything without one.
Hey everyone, thanks so much for your help! I've learned a lot from this. What really helped was using a USB stick to plug into the PC with "Hiren's BootCD PE". With that tool, I went into the "Crystal Disk Info" and found out that the 'health status' on my 1TB SSD actually said it was "Bad". So yeah, my other 500GB SSD is still in good shape. Right now I'm installing Windows. Have a nice day to everyone!
The 970 Evo Plus comes with a five-year warranty. If your hard drive is still covered under that warranty, you can send it back to get a brand-new 1TB 970 Evo Plus as a replacement. That said, my very first 970 Evo Plus 2TB unit died pretty soon after I bought it. It only ran for about two weeks before the drive completely stopped working (it was acting like an OS drive and didn't show up in BIOS). I sent it back with an RMA and got a brand-new replacement, which has been running smoothly ever since for over three years now.
A battery in the BIOS chip helps keep the computer running when you are not using it. If that battery starts getting weak but isn't gone yet, your computer stops keeping important settings safe. This means those settings disappear if power cuts and the battery dies at the same time. Sometimes this happens even if you plug into a wall outlet because nobody notices unless they unplug it first. I have seen computers seem to work but then fail to save some settings after turning off, unplugging, and plugging back in again. This is like losing protection against power drops on a UPS. It's not just for BIOS chips; if you look at the signals used to send complex messages, they become unreliable if there is too much "jitter" (wiggling) or if the voltage changes too much from time to time. The PCIe connection is one example of this problem. Here is what we learn: keeping bits safe depends on having a steady voltage; sometimes small mistakes in the signal can cause big problems later, especially if you check both ends at the same time. A BIOS chip without stable power and data can flip single bits without stopping all communication. This makes brownout issues very dangerous because they corrupt parts of data even though nothing seems wrong right now. You are right that nobody should buy a UPS with no AVR (Automatic Voltage Regulator). In fact, manufacturers shouldn't sell UPSs without an AVR, but they do sometimes. It's harder to manage when the battery is already weak but not broken yet. How would you design a battery that knows it is halfway done and shuts down instead? Replacing a button cell battery is easy; figuring out why a power source is failing while still working is very hard because it looks normal at first glance.
Think about how many different MoBos and BIOSes have been made over the years (not just for home computers, but also laptops and servers). Yes, it's possible that some BIOSes work only when the CMOS battery is charged enough. However, with consumer desktops, I've seen cases where the BIOS either works or doesn't at all, usually because the update broke something. I should look into ways to remove the CMOS battery entirely. For example, SSDs can keep data without power, so maybe they could hold a BIOS setting too. That's just a thought. The OP figured out who caused this problem and we're done with that topic.