The motherboard is from an unknown Chinese OEM and it's using a laptop core i7 but in a itx form factor. I have no idea of the brand, really. The box just says "motherboard" and there's no silkscreen on the PCB (it was very fun guessing which pins were for the front panel). No user manual was included. The bios it says "version: default string"

I hate when OEMs lock down bios settings but here is the opposite, they enabled everything

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've never seen this before but I did some googling and it looks like you're in a setup utility for setting up a BIOS. Here's a link to some info that might be helpful. The minitool link says this can happen because the computer can't detect your hard drives, so it might not resolve anything. Have you tried booting with a Windows or Linux installation USB drive?

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do-i-get-off-of-aptio-setup-utility/ccabf95a-4e59-49b8-b16b-5cfdc3b3deff

https://www.minitool.com/backup-tips/aptio-setup-utility.html

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

The hint worked! It mentioned to enable csm, but for windows 11 is useless as it doesn't support booting in legacy mode. But it was loading a loader from Rufus before Windows, so I tried to check if it was interfering with that. I checked secure boot. It was enabled but with custom keys by default. Why the F would they create a default with invalid secure boot keys??

Once restored to Microsoft keys, the USB booted without showing the Rufus UEFI loader and the setup recognized the drive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You really don't want to cheap out on motherboards, without a manual and being a no name brand, there's no way to know what anything does.

Some options might be random or do nothing.

And maybe the NVME hookup is broke or never real to begin with.

You could mess around and try to get it working, but you're risking it breaking other components. Even if you have to buy the cheapest brand name motherboard, I'd make that a priority.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

From the bios I can see everything about the drives I tested, serial number, activate hardware encryption and so on, so at least the connector isn't broken.

It was a purchase on a whim, i wouldn't buy it again. The CPU is permanently soldered on it, if the mobo stops working I lose both components

Lesson learned, from now on I will always buy reputable brands. If there's a bug in this bios build nobody would ever fix it. Or if it was fixed, good luck finding the right file for an unbranded unlabeled product..

Then I remember that I bought a MSI b650 that doesn't play nice with a MSI GPU since the November bios update...