HP Z2 G4 SFF M.2 SSD slots

[Shadowed6]

I cannot find anything helpful in regard to an actual manual for the motherboard or system. 

I am trying to figure out if there is a trick to getting my SSD 0 slot to show up in an OS or even the RST. I have tested multiple sticks and a factory defaulted CMOS. I know some motherboards have tradeoffs for their SSD slot like using SSD0-1 disables SATA 5-6. 

thanks

[SDH]

Sometimes a BIOS update is needed... Is yours the latest?

Good advice is to set BIOS to factory defaults, and to have only the M.2 NVMe SSD in the primary M.2 socket, with no other drive present (other than your clean install media be it optical drive or bootable USB). A clean install with BIOS at factory defaults is key. The primary M.2 socket has "SSD0" or "SSD#0" printed in small letters on the motherboard, shown below:

Primary = SSD0 = far left

Do you know about the HP Cloud Recovery tool? HP has a downloadable installer for Windows 10 and 11 that will work for you assuming that your workstation was originally a Windows licensed build. The tool lets you download a HP Recovery OS installer onto a bootable USB thumb drive. 

I hit one snag on a Z640 in which the installer USB could not work with a target drive that was MBR partitioned. Once I repartitioned it to GPT the drivers present on that USB could then work with the target drive and the install could proceed. Agree that NVMe M.2 sticks are fast and truly feel faster than a SATA SSD. They do seem more "fiddly" during OS installs, however.

User Guide and Maintenance and Service Guide download link that works is HERE . A recent QuickSpecs is attached below.

[SDH]

Sometimes a functional recent Cloud Recovery tool is hard to find. For your workstation below is a pic of how I found it with the address in the Edge address bar above and it also shows where I found it there... It was under the W11 22H2 section. It will want a 32GB USB drive. I'd format that FAT32 to start with. This will only work if it was a Windows licensed build to start with.