ASRock Extreme 4 Z87 not booting USB device....

[wotan]

I'm building a new PC and here are the specs:

ASRock Extreme 4 Z87 Motherboard
i7 4770k
2x8gb Crucial DDR3
Samsung Pro 120gb SSD
WD 2tb Hard Drive
GTX 295
750watt PSU

Everything went together correctly and boots up OK but I can't for the life of me get a USB stick to come up on the boot menu. I've tried all the USB ports, enabling/disabling the legacy support and IDE/AHCI modes for the SATA controller. I've tried creating a disk with Rufus (GPT vs. MBR) and I've tried creating a regular windows 8 recovery disk from another machine.

I'm at my wits end here! Help??

 

[fralexandr]

I'm guessing your bios is set to boot from usb?
Is your USB boot drive configured correctly?
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool
I think the windows 7 tool works with windows 8 too. I can't find a windows 8 usb tool.

don't have another dvd drive lying around? I have an external usb dvd drive for things like this. The first time i tried to USB boot windows 7 was a pita.

 

[wowsza]

does the drive boot in other computers?

 

[Steltek]

does the drive boot in other computers?

+1

I have a couple of USB drives that won't boot on any computer, no matter how they are prepared. If you have another one laying around, give it a try to see if it makes a difference.

 

[redzo]

I can't for the life of me get a USB stick to come up on the boot menu.

Make sure that "Secure Boot" is disabled from the system BIOS. Also, I don't know how Asrock's "fast boot" function is implemented, but it may be something similar to secure boot/uefi. Disable that also and make sure that the bios is set to boot in a "legacy + uefi" combined mode, or "legacy" only.
By pressing the "quick boot" menu button at post(don't know what key for your particular mobo/bios) it's important that the usb stick get's listed there as a bootable device option. If it's not present there, it won't boot.
It doesn't matter if the usb flash/hdd is properly created for booting, it should still show on your device boot list. That is mandatory! Otherwise it will never work.