nvme ssd booting for hp z820 with samsung 950 pro

[readonly1]

 My HP z820 is dual CPUs with 96Gb memory,  windows 10 pro with latest update. Its BIOS is also update-to-date.

The NVME SSD M2 adapter is

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079JVGJFV/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The NVME SSD is samsung 950 Pro 256gb, I can see it in my boot disk list in BIOS.

The HP Z820's orginal boot disk is LSI SICI disk 1Tb. I tried two ways to clone the original drive

1) EaseUS system clone

2)Samsung Data Migration tool

  After the system clone, shutdown and reboot the system, change the boot order with NVME SSD (950 pro) as the booting disk,

I always get the error message

 Non-booting system disk or Disk error

  From all the googled online resource, it should boot from my 950 pro. The only thing I have not tried

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c04205252

Page 33

 I installed 950 pro SSD in location 16 (PCIE x8(4)), there is another location 20. (the leftest PCIE x8(4))

 please advice, thanks

[CharlieZ800]

There is a setting somewhere in the Bios to enable ACHI and also UEFI boot. You need to have these set. I forget exactly what they are but if you cant find them let me know and i can reboot and look in the bios.

[readonly1]

CharlieZ800,

  Thanks for your help. I did look around in BIOS for the booting setup. As far as I know, the only setup in bios is 

1) whether to enable UEFI boot

2) For legacy boot, you can specify the boot order/perference for the disks 

 Under 2), I can clearly see my Samsung 950 pro SSD 

 BTW, my Samsuung 950 Pro SSD is not ACHI, it is PCIE NVME but with built-in OPROM.

I have not got time,  may try to do a fresh install in the ssd.

Thanks again

[CharlieZ800]

The thing is it was a long time ago sionce i did it and i did both a Z800 and Z820 with NVME boot drives and both processes were different.

Just looked in BIOS the important setting is Advanced>Device Options>Mass Storage Option ROM>EFI

But you do need to make sure that the NVME drive is formatted as GPT otherwise it will never be bootable. The easiest way to check all of this is to start to do a fresh install, if the WIN 10 install recognises the NVME drive as available to install on then all of the settings are correct. So in theory you should be able to clone the HDD to the NVME drive and all will work. As I did not clone my HDDto NVME  i cannot say if you can make a clone of a FAT or NTFS disk as a GPT disk.

Someone else on the forum can probably answer that better than me.

Good luck

CS