Hello,

Hopefully someone can help me...I had a recent HDD failure and ordered recovery media from the ASUS e-store.

I have tried with 3 different optical drives and various BIOS settings. (unable to enable CSM mode boot in the latest bios, which I upgraded to while troubleshooting the issue)

When I boot up with the recovery DVD (1/2) it gets past the initial Windows logo and ends up on a gray screen with a mouse cursor:

• If XHCI pre-boot is auto or disabled - it reboots after a few seconds at this point
  
• If XHCI pre-boot is set to enabled - it will hang at this gray screen with the mouse cursor forever
  
• 
  

I didn't know it wasn't possible to "downgrade" the BIOS or I would have updated it incrementally...

I did contact the ASUS e-store and they are sending me a new set of recovery media.

Does anyone know of a reason this behavior may not be related to simply a faulty set of recovery disks? For some reason I doubt that is the reason for the failure.

Thanks!

Nicholas