Z Turbo Drive transfer from z620 to z420- strange behavior ?

[BambiBoomZ]

Good morning,

Having had a very good result with a Z Turbo M.2  256GB AHCI in the office z620, as the BIOS is the same as the newer office z420,  I thought I might try simply plugging the Z Turbo into the z420 and see what happens.  Both systems have the latest 3.91 BIOS.

I disconnected the Intel 730 and WD Black drives, plugged the Z Turbo into the z420 on the recommended Slot 4.  Windows (7 Pro 64) started and all the programs run.  I'm typing this in the z420 now.

However, after shutting down and plugging the Intel 730 and WD Black back in to SATA 0 and 1, Windows would not start, giving an error message that "the boot drive is formatted as GPT and legacy boot is not supported".  There are then options to launch Windows setup or Windows Repair.

In case the Intel 730's  still active C: partition was causing a conflict, I disconnected the 730 and WD drives from the z420 and brought over the Samsung 850 Evo from the z620 which is GPT and connected to SATA 0. 

Again there appeared the same legacy boot is not supported error message, even though both the drives connected were GPT.  Having the WD Black connected also triggers the error, but when that is unplugged, the Z Turbo works perfectly. Tthe drive mode by the way is RAID + AHCI.

In comparing the system setup configurations, it appears in the z620 that the Z -Turbo is listed under UEFI (under the Samsung SM951 model number) while in the z420, it's under legacy devices as "M.2Slot4".

I don't understand why it works but can not tolerate a the presence of another drive that is MBR (Master Boot Record).  GPT formatted boot drives can access MBR partitions. If an MBR is converted to GPT the data is lost becuase the fundamental file structure is reformatted.

How can I move the the Z Turbo to appear  in the UEFI section?

Does this mean I'll have to reinstall Windows and all the programs to have the drive recognized? 

Thanks!

BambiBoomZ

Round 2:

Good Evening,

I had the thought to try cloning the z620 C: drive to the Samsung 850 Evo scratch disk, then transfer it to the z420 as the boot drive.  This did clone well and when I restarted the z620, it booted from the 850 Evo rather than the Z Turbo drive still present. That was perplexing as the Z Turbo is still selected as the boot drive in the boot order.

However, in the z420 there was the same error message that the drive was GPT and Legacy Boot was therefore not available.  That makes sense, but I also thought it might sense to disable Legacy boot (=F5) in the boot order menu, but the message was same.

What am I missing?  If the drive is GPT and has the boot partition, - which is the same situation as for the Z Turbo- why doesn't either appear in the UEFI devices list?

 BambiBoomZ

[BambiBoomZ]

Good Afternoon,

The difficulty with GPT partitioned drive booting on the z420  was solved quite easily.  The drive had to ve converted from GPT to MBR.  However, I always bleieved that soing so would obliterate all the files. But, using Easeus Partition Master >  right clicking  on the Drive  number containing  the C: partition abd then "Apply" on both the Z Turbo and Samsung 850 EVO converted them from GPT to MBR without loss.  These then booted with out a Legacy BIOS conflict. So the z420 3D modeling workstation and the z620 simulation /rendering system have matching hard drives. The Z turbo drive had very good performance in the z620- 13460 on Passmark. That's as good as a number of NVMe drives.

The z420 is an experiment as the first office system having are no mechanical drives- only the Z Turbo and an Intel 730 480GB.  

The data only drives can be GPT which does have the advantage of having each partition use seperate partition configuration. If the file structure fails on one partition, the others are still accesible as compared to MBR where the entire drive is affected.

Cheers,

BambiBoomZ