Windows Updates, TPM, Wiped OS Drive

Question

Hi,

I work with system integrators to do tech support. Since Mid-March I have had an influx of tickets with the following issue and I kid you not, they all come in after the 2nd or 4th Tuesday of every month. Like clock work now I know I am going to get at least ONE, if not more, tickets with the same problem. I am hoping that I can find other people who have experienced this.

Customer states that after a shutdown or restart their PC now only boots to BIOS (otherwise no known issues and PC was performing just fine). Upon inspection ALL drives are recognized by the bios, including documented OS drive, but no bootable device is found.

At first I wasn't sure what was going on and couldn't really find anything around forums of similar issue, so I just had folks re-install Windows, drivers, etc. and then they've gone about their lives just fine. I've been digging around the internet though and have found other people with the same problem. One of my customers is also a high level IT professional, and ironically, the only customer who this has happened to TWICE now. After this happened to him the first time, he took his M.2 drive and attempted data recovery but could not find ANY! The second time around he hypothesized that it could be related to Windows Security Updates and TPM.

However since it appears all data is lost on the drive, and since changing TPM settings from firmware to discrete can wipe the drive anyways, I have not been able to access any logs, events, etc. etc. So no way for me to pinpoint anything or provide any additional details outside of hardware related things.

OS: Both Windows 10 and Windows 11
OS Drive Type: Gen 3 M.2 nVME, both nVME 1.3 and 1.4
Chipset: z590, z690, b550 and x570 (thus far)

Various different processors, both 11th and 12th gen intel and Ryzen 5000 series.
Both Radeon and nVidia GPU's.

My latest customer had a TUF Gaming B550m-plus wifi board with bios version 2423 (from 8-17-2021). He says he had not made any changes to the bios himself. Speaking with the system integrator, they only enable XMP, but otherwise leave the bios settings alone.

So, seeing that this was a similar problem to all the others I asked the customer to first try resetting the BIOS to default settings. He did. The only thing that changed was TPM Firmware -----> Discrete.

Mind you, the default settings on that BIOS version have TPM on discrete. If neither him, nor the SI, changed the TPM setting to FIRMWARE, how did it change?

After seeing that it was setting TPM back to discrete from firmware I told customer to stop (because doing so could wipe the data). Instead we went ahead an updated the bios to latest version, 2803 from 4-29-2022. After BIOS update, attempted to have him restart the machine, but same problem - it went back to BIOS and NO BOOT DEVICE found.

So, I had him check TPM setting and it was indeed on FIRMWARE. Customer stated they were ok with possibly losing data so I said full send buddy, change it to discrete (maybe by some miracle we'll get a boot device). F10, save and exit, boots back to bios, no boot device and TPM IS BACK ON FIRMWARE DESPITE BEING CHANGED TO DISCRETE. I had him repeat this process 3 times and each time the TPM setting would go back to FIRMWARE.

I would chalk it up to bad hardware but the amount of folks it has happened to, the time frame that is happens in, the criss-cross of hardware, that after a new install of Windows 10/11 everything works fine; I just can't imagine it isn't somehow related to TPM and Windows Updates. That's really the only pattern I've been able to discern.

What is going on? Has anyone else experienced this problem? Any insight is appreciated.

Answer 1

Hello,

Unfortunately the TPM BIOS settings depend only in updates provided by the motherboard manufacturer. If this occurs in regular basis it is possible that some manufacturer chipset application in Windows is automatically installing BIOS or Firmware updates.

By default, due to the release of Windows 11, most manufacturers have already pushed updates to set "Enable Firmware TPM" as default, and even if the user selects "Discrete" the BIOS may fall back to Firmware. But this would be exactly the opposite you are experiencing.

On the other hand, the Firmware TPM may be limited by the "Security Device Support" option in BIOS (I am mentioning ASUS example, as closer to my experience), if "Security Device Support" is set to Disable, then TPM will reset as Discrete and TPM enabled Devices will not show. Worth a check.

All in all, I would recommend posting the question in the Forums or Support channels of the manufacturer of the BIOS, in order to get more details or troubleshooting.

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Answer 2

Thanks for the response!

The issue is that it's happened across many different boards and manufacturers.

Yesterday it happened to a local customer, this is the third time its happened to him. He brought in the machine and I took the drive out to immediately try data recovery.

There was no indication that any data had ever been on the drive. I know with certain enterprise drives there are built in chips that would be able to do this level of a wipe as a security feature, but I don't believe that is the same for consumer level SSD's. So I am super puzzled. Plus the frequency of this occurrence and the various manufacturers I can not isolate it to anything specific on the hardware front.