JaredT

Don't count on anything until you get an official offer letter. Maybe you should keep interviewing until you don't hate it any more.

Haha well it'd be put to good use, I promise :)

If you have a microcenter nearby you can get them for like $3

It might not be a bad idea to buy a new 4gb thumb drive and put a brand new windows iso on it

If it is working for you as intended you're probably fine to keep it

If you don't normally keep a USB drive plugged in it is not a bad idea

Yeah set USB as #1

I'd say most common is f9, then delete

Usually f9/f10/delete

Try plugging in the old HDD and flashing the bios

Hmm.

Could it be that the windows image on the thumb drive was corrupted?

Hmm.

Plug in the thumb drive then pick the recovery option

What kind of things do you see under advanced options?

And tell me if it boots normally

Pull out the thumb drive and hit restart

Did it boot normally or into recovery mode?

From the SSD or from the thumb?

Yeah a lot of modern mobos have a setting to extend the splash screen just for this reason

It's generally a safe idea to make usb/dvd a higher priorty boot drive than your typical OS drive because of this, it just gets a little dicey when you regularly keep a disk or usb drive in the machine

That'd be the trick to getting that to work

Can you set removable media/USB to be a higher boot priority than the ssd?

So at this point you can successfully enter bios?

Still have that windows bootable thumb?

Yeah it looks like it isn't recognizing your windows install.

What message is that?

Go ahead and make the SSD the primary boot device

You did manage to install windows on the ssd, right?

Haha glad I could help :)

That sounds like good news

Good news?

Sounds like a similar issue to what you're experiencing

Take a look at this thread: tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-1736983/…

How many times would you say you've rebooted and gotten the same result (boot > 3 seconds black screen > reboot)

No it should use a small speaker built into the motherboard

Do you get any POST beep codes?

Do you have any thumb drives plugged in?

At this point I'm trying to remove possible points of failure. Storage isn't required to get to BIOS

Generally no, that's a pretty standard procedure for even 15 year old bios

Have you tried unplugging all storage drives and trying to boot?

Do you have another machine you can test individual components with?

Did the 100% fan spinup not usually occur? A lot of computers do a second or two full spin-up to get the fans going as lower RPM values sometimes do not provide enough kinetic energy to get the fan spinning from a dead stop

Also, did you ground yourself protecting from ESD?

The fact that replacing the SSD with the old HDD leads to me believe something may have been misplaced/dislodged/damaged in the process of installing the SSD. Check and make sure all connections are secure, no exposed metal making contact with bare components, etc.

Is there a disk in the dvd drive?