After spending far too much of my life on this I found this thread. So I decided to post my story.
I have an asrock ab350 gaming k4. I have a mixed rig. I had 4 1060s and 2 580s to put me under my 1000w psu.
I originally bought two of these rigs. My first had no problem with 5 gpu and is still running 5.
The second rig I fought with. And fought. And fought. It was 3 months ago so I don't recall the details but I believe I was able to get 6 cards running by installing drivers one by one and mucking with slots. After it was running it was totally stable and never did the black screen booting windows ->recovery. .
Last week a fan died in the second rig and I swapped a 1060 with another 1060. Nothing else changed and now the machine will not get to windows with more than 4 cards. I had forgotten about the initial pain of setup and now I'm pretty pissed.
However, I did have a m2 to pcie card laying around. So props to the previous post about trying that. I originally stuck it in m2_2 -and windows didn't see the card. So I tried m2_1 and moved one gpu out of pcie 4. Now I have 5 cards running.
Later, I might try to get the 6th working. I'm thinking if I boot to safe mode and install the drivers for 6th I might be able to get it going.
This is exactly what happened to me! Now i am going to try that m.2 trick too. Will keep you guys updated.
Update: Finally made it work. Not by using m.2. Just switch the pci-e slot and finally find one combination works. What a day...
Do you recall what you changed? Did you just swap cards in random slots until it worked? Were you installing drivers? And did you get 5 or 6 working?