Fatal1ty Z370 Professional Gaming i7

Hello,

jb_1977 wrote: Hello, I built a system with this mobo with actual BIOS and an intel i7 8700k. I installed a Samsung SM951 512Gb in M2_1 and all worked fine with Win10pro installed. Then I wanted to add some SATA drives to the system. This went bad. It will stuck on the boot screen saying "F2 Del to enter setup... blabla" and so on and has the Error Code "A0" on the mobo. But pressing F2 or Del does nothing. I cant get into the UEFI. I did a CMOS clear with the rear button, and then the system boots (with one or two reboots) into windows and the drive is ready to use. BUT : When I restart my system, the systym stucks again with error code "A0" on the boot screen and I have to do the CMOS clear again. I tested all of the SATA boards and with different drives (HardDisks and sata SSDs). Any suggestions? Juergen

For some reason your board is failing the POST process with the SATA drives connected, which is why you cannot get into the UEFI/BIOS, although you still see the message about pressing F2.

Is your SM951 the ACHI or NVMe version of that SSD?

What is the entry in the Boot Order in the UEFI/BIOS for the SM951?

The M2_1 slot shares resources with the Intel SATA3_0 and SATA3_1 ports, so those two SATA ports cannot be used when an SSD is in the M2_1 slot. Only the M2_3 slot does not share resources with the SATA ports, except if the M.2 drive in that slot is a SATA type SSD. Your SM951 is not a SATA SSD, so that does not apply to it.

The sharing of the M.2 slots and SATA ports is standard for Intel Z370 and other Intel chipset boards. Please see the Storage section of your board's Specifications for details:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Fatal1ty%20Z370%20Professional%20Gaming%20i7/index.asp#Specification

Are any of the SATA drives connected to the ASMedia SATA ports? The two ASMedia SATA ports are those at the bottom of the stack of SATA ports, just above the Power button on the board.

If any of your drives are connected to the ASMedia SATA ports, just move the SATA data cable up to the four available Intel SATA ports, SATA3_2, SATA3_3, SATA3_4, or SATA3_5. The Intel SATA ports perform much better, and the ASMedia SATA ports do not work well with some drives.

Did you install any SATA driver(s) after you installed Windows? That is not required, just wondering if you installed either the Intel or ASMedia SATA drivers.

Did you try adding one of your SATA drives to the board at a time? The drives may test fine on another PC, but the power connection to the drives on this PC might cause this problem. Have you tried different SATA data and power cables to the SATA drives?

Do any of the SATA drives have an OS installation on them? Or were they in another PC when Windows was installed on another drive? If any of the SATA drives has a Windows System/Boot partition on them, that could cause confusion when booting.