Z440 nvme OS installation.

[Wae1]

Hello,

I have a business workstation Z440 and installed with a Turbo Z card with Samsung 980 PRO 512GB into PCIe 3 slot. I wanted to install a new Window OS unfortunately can't seem to do it.

-Inserted OS disc, cant boot from the cd room
-The BIOS is not detecting the NVME SSD.

Any assistance on installing the OS would be appreciated. Thanks.
Waee

[BeemerBiker]

You might want to read this thread and possibly ask @SESA207478  how it got working

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/Z440-with-M-2-NVMe-bootable-OS/...

another option is using a disk cache to speed up the existing drives'

I am using a 128gb m.2 on an x4 PCIe card in my Z400 workstation.  I cannot boot from it but the PrimoCache works nicely and speeds up all disk drives not just the C drive

If you only have a single sata drive then putting the OS on the m.2 is better.

The adapter I have (see above) cannot be booted on the Z400 and I would have to get a more expensive adapter with a chipset to allow booting..  You might compare your adapter to the ones mention in the link I posted.

[SDH]

It can be a bit tricky. I've found even with the ZX20 workstations that the exact version of the "Storage Controllers" drivers can be a make or break issue. A clone of one of my Z620 v2 builds that can run fine on a SSD cannot run on a HP ZTD. Another clone of a very similar Z620 v2 build that can run on both a SSD and a HP ZTD can run on either a SSD or a ZTD on another virtually identical Z620.v2 build. The only difference was the Storage Controllers drivers version.

Here's my advice for the Z440: This is a member of one of the first families of HP workstations that allows you use the HP Cloud Recovery Tool system to download a full HP-selected W10Pro64 build onto a USB thumb drive, a master build from HP for the Z440, but older. This process works if your Z440 is "branded" (firmware-licensed) to run Windows... look for the Windows icon sticker on your case backplane, or a Windows reference in tiny letters on one of the case-bottom stickers.

Update your BIOS to the latest version, and set to Factory Defaults.  Put your ZTD into slot 4 (not 3). Slot 4 is the recommended one, by HP. Have no other drives attached at this stage... just the ZTD. Follow the HP directions on loading your HP Cloud Recovery W10Pro64 OS from the thumb drive... this build will have all the correct drivers (including the proper Storage Controller drivers) that will work with the ZTD. Once that is done now attach to the internet and use Windows Update to upgrade your W10Pro64 OS from there. You'll need to know a bit about setting the Z440 boot order to the ZTD.