Booting to Samsung 960 EVO - 500GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD on my HP Envy 810-150se

[MKinney]

Recently purchased a Samsung 960 EVO - 500GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD and a Ableconn PEXM2-SSD M.2 NGFF PCIe SSD to PCI Express 3.0 x4 Host Adapter Card thinking I could use this combo to boot to a SSD.  The computer is a HP Envy 810-150se.   The motherboard is a Pegatron IPIWN-PB (Bios PI2_818.ROM v8.18).  The current harddrives are 2 WD 10EZEX 1.0TB drives in the RAID config. 

The SSD drive was recognized and I was able to clone the C: drive using the Samsung Clone software.  Rebooted a few times and got it to show up as a usable drive but I can't figure out how to set it up as a boot disk.  I've looked through the bios settings not finding anything that I think would help.

Can this be done?  Is there a newer bios to update?  Does the RAID config need to be turned off?  Do I need to disable the non-used SATA channels?

My fall back plan is to get a SATA SSD and use that but I think the PCIe NVMe is much faster.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,  Mike

[Grzwacz · Accepted solution]

Hello MKinney

Have worked on an HP 810-150se.

Have not seen any BIOS options to boot from PCIe in BIOS. This PC is limited to PCIe 2.0 also.

I don't believe the Samsung 960 SSD can be seen as a boot drive on the Pittsburgh2 motherboard in either PCIE 3 x 4 or SATA mode. You usually have to set BIOS to boot to M.2 by disabling SATA port 0 or 1 depending on the way the SATA drives are defined on the motherboard.

AHCI is recommended for the 960. But changing from RAID to AHCI can also be a problem. Windows 10 may be more forgiving but doing this on Windows 7 causes operating system load problems.

The last BIOS update, 8.20 Rev.A appears to not provide updates for booting to NVMe M.2 drives.

There may be a workaround but I am not aware of any.

Grzy

[MKinney]

Thanks for the help Grzy! I'll have to look at another solution .

[Grzwacz]

Hi MKinney

You are welcome.

Did the adapter come with a driver disc or instructions on setting the drive as bootable?

Maybe you somehow could add a driver to use the M.2 as a boot drive. This would have to be done by installing Windows clean  and then inject the driver during installation.

Just a thought

Grzy