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HP Recommended
Microsoft Windows 10 (64-bit)

Hi all,

Tearing my hair out here! I have a faithful old Z400 that I sucessfully installed Windows 10 on a couple of years ago. The disk is (was) a Plextor PCIe SSD., which is labelled  "M.2 to PCIe Transfer Board". The Plextor has failed completely. IMPORTANT! Up to this point, Windows 10 was running perfectly on this old Z400!

 

I bought an AURORA RGB AIC NVMe SSD PCIe card. I boot the PC from a W10 install USB. I get "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu".

Please note, this workstation does NOT have support for UEFI secure boot, so any suggestions to disable CSM are invalid - that simply doesn't exist in the BIOS settings.

What's really strange is that if I boot to Windows setup from the USB and Shift F10 into DISKPART, if I "list disk", the unpartitioned disk is visible.  I used diskpart to set the disk to MBR and also tried creating a partition, settinmg it active. No dice!

Somewhere I think I saw something about older PCs not being able to boot from NMVMe SSD's

Can anyone guide me to a solution please?

Richard

4 REPLIES 4
HP Recommended

There are posts about using a Kingston Predator M.2 SSD (AHCI-controller on the stick, not NVMe-controller) in Zx00 workstations here in the forum, running W10 and W11 latest builds. Those work great. Kingston sold them without and with a Kingston PCIe M.2 carrier card. I like the HP ZTD G2 card better, but it takes a special trick to get working. Below is one of a good number of posts related to this. I'd recommend a clean W11 23H2 install for you. Here's from a month ago:

 

Z Turbo drive G2 - HP Support Community - 8929668

 

Some of my latest work with the Predator was recent, using a HP Z Turbo Drive G2 card as the Predator's carrier, in a PCIe Gen 2 x8 electrical lane slot. I downloaded the latest W11 23H2 v2 .iso (yes there is a v2 download now) from Microsoft and targeted that during use of the latest Rufus technique of creating a bootable installer USB drive. I checked all boxes on the last page of Rufus prep that shows when you click on Ready. From experience the MS W10 activation servers are the same for W11. You disconnect from the internet before your W11 install so you can get a local-account-only install. Read up on that.

 

That W11 installer is the very latest. It got all the necessary drivers in place for boot. Plugged in the internet access, ran Windows Update, and all done. I installed onto the Zx00 workstations with the latest BIOS already onboard, and set BIOS to Factory Defaults before the install. It put on all the right drivers the first time around and a clean install is the way to go.

 

Those Predators are now hard to find, out of production, but last a very long time. I have 3 Z600s running on them just for fun and I'd not hesitate to do that again. I only bought the 240GB versions. Good review:

 

Kingston HyperX Predator 480GB m.2 PCIe SSD Review | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

 

You must read up on how to remove the Q1 transistor from a HP ZTD G2 card to let it work with the Predator on the Zx00 workstations... it is easy and does not degrade use that card for later use in a HP workstation that does not need that trick applied. Those are excellent HP cards. It is all in here, and check for my posts here via google too because our forum search engine here  sometimes sadly seems based on AI... Artificial Ignorance.

 

There are firmware updaters for the Predator M.2 sticks... I finally figured them out. It turns out there are two branches of the Predators... original and newer. One branch has firmware that ends with a letter and the other branch ends with a number. Either branch will work for you but I'd update to the latest firmware before OS install. I can help with that later if you proceed. Kingston says do FW updates in their PCIe card. I've done them fine in the better "Q1-out" modified HP ZTD G2 card too. I'd say the Kingston card is B+ to A quality but the HP ZTD G2 card is A+++ quality. Those truly were a "loss-leader" for sale of the HP M.2 sticks and now they are very attractive in pricing on eBay if you know what you're doing.

HP Recommended

I just looked around a bit... those Predator M.2 sticks may not be findable new now. In that case you may have to settle for using a SATA SSD. You probably know the Zx00 workstations are all only SATAII technology but you certainly can still use a SATAIII SSD in them. It will just run at SATAII SSD speeds. That's still much better than a HDD running at SATAII speeds. Regardless, I'd still go for loading W11 22H3 v2 onto the 2.5" form factor SATA SSD using the Rufus method.

 

When clean installing do make sure your BIOS is the latest version, and set it to "Factory Defaults" and save on the way out of BIOS if that option is presented. Remove any HDD/SSD drive from the workstation other than your target drive... you can put them back in later. Preset your intended "usual" boot drive as highest in order inside BIOS but use F9 at time of your install cold boot for its "1-time" boot capability to target the Rufus-created bootable W11 installer USB. This way after the clean install's auto-reboot the BIOS/OS will take you to the SSD rather than cycling back to the bootable USB.

 

DGroves has mentioned that the Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVMe-controller M.2 SSD has AHCI boot code built into its controller but I don't know if that would work in a Zx00 workstation. IIRC I tried loading W11 onto a SM951 AHCI-controller M.2 stick in one of my Z600s (which worked fine with the AHCI-controller Predator M.2 stick mounted in the same Q1-out ZTD G2). However, I could not get the installer to see that SM951 M.2 stick as a bootable device.  I have not tried that with a 950 Pro M.2 stick in a Zx00, but DGroves may have. The SM951 AHCI-controller M.2 stick boots fine in a Zx20 next generation workstation.

 

Clearly there is something special about the Kingston Predator M.2 AHCI-controller drives. Search for SHPM2280P2/240G or SHPM2280P2H/240G if you wish.

HP Recommended

have a 950 pro but no z440/600 so i can't give a answer however it did work on my z800 as i recall

 

also, the 400/800GB seagate warpdrive pci-e cards should boot in the z400/600/800 systems (it did in my z800/z820)

 

you can find the oracle f40/f80 cards on ebay that have been flashed from the oracle OEM firmware back to the retail seagate warpdrive firmware do note that these cards require a driver to be loaded during the OS install if you wish to boot from it

 

the warpdrive will be a bit faster than a SATA drive but not majorly so as such unless you can get a 400gb warpdrive for under 40 dollars with shipping my recommendation is stick with a sata ssd

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Thank you to both SDH and DGroves for trying to help. However, I gave up, having spent days (weeks?) on this. After all, this venerable beast dates from about 9 years back. Also, the Windows 10 install was becoming rather "Whiskery"!

 

I replaced it with something completely different. A HP Elite Dragonfly G2 Notebook that I'd bought at a big discount. I also have the HP monitor that has Thunderbolt and supplies USB, Video and Network via a single Thunderbolt cabl. And of course Windows 11. It's fas(er), W11, and everything works, plus I can simply unplug one cable and put it in my bag!

Thanks again!

Richard

† The opinions expressed above are the personal opinions of the authors, not of HP. By using this site, you accept the <a href="https://www8.hp.com/us/en/terms-of-use.html" class="udrlinesmall">Terms of Use</a> and <a href="/t5/custom/page/page-id/hp.rulespage" class="udrlinesmall"> Rules of Participation</a>.