Z Turbo Drive G2 + Samsung 970 EVO 1 TB - Can not reboot.

[dot_dot]

I have installed a Z Turbo Drive G2 on a few Z640's, and placed an imaged 1TB 970 EVO with Windows 10 64 bits.

I can start the machines, and if i shutdown, they always start.
But if I try to reboot, they never start.

This is what i am confronted with sometimes. other times it does not even detect a drive at all:

I need some help here guys, I'm a bit lost. Windows is not my thing, I've been using Ubuntu for 10 years...

[DGroves]

from within windows disable the "FastBoot" option

you can also increase the "boot delay" time in the bios

last i've seen many windows OS image installs do strange things, so if all else fails try a clean win 10 install using the HP  "cloud Recovery" restore image which can be downloaded from HP, as the z640 has a official win 10 restore image that includes all required drivers

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05115630

[dot_dot]

Thanks for the tips.
I tried all your suggestions but to no avail.

Yesterday I decided to dig a bit deeper, and have been confronted with what i think is the root cause of the issue:
By cycling  ALL my NVME's, and ALL my Z Turbo G2 adapters between my good machine, and the ones with problems i am satisfied that the software is fine, and that the Bios settings are fine on all of them (copied from my machine that reboots just fine).
That leaves me with a  hardware problem.

I was able to get 2 of the workstations to display the same error (the slot changed to whichever slot the Z Turbo G2 was on):

928-Fatal PCIe error.
PCIe error detected
Surprise link down error
Completion Timeout on Slot 4
Gferrsts: 0x40 Xpuncerrests: 0x0 Uncerrsts:0x4020

This to me looks like for some reason 3 out of 4 machines have some fault whereby they can not reboot from a PCIe source.
But boot just fine from HDDs...

[DGroves]

and again i will tell you that the imaging is most likely the root cause

and that a clean install to the nvme ssd will most likely work without any issues

[dot_dot]

I completely forgot to mention that I did install using the HP image that you so kindly posted the path to.
And I had the same weird behaviour, where boots from cold always work, but reboots always fail to detect the PCIe, and will return a error code 928.
Yesterday I decided to promote one to Ubuntu, and the same happened. So that eliminates a software variation/root cause.

When I put the NVME drives on a SFF to LFF converter, it boots straight away. Albeit without the benefit of PCIe lanes speeds.

It might be that something else is causing this, but these machines are all identical as much as I can tell:

• Save Motherboard version 212A
• Same Firmware 2.24
• Same graphics card, on the same slot.
• Same ram quantity, same dimms.
• Same processors.
• Same version of the Z Turbo G2
• Same NVME drives (manufactured on the same day even)

For the life of me I can not find another possibility than a PCIe controller failure, or a firmware bug...
Time to return those 3 workstations 😕