HP 8300 Boot From NVMe

[Apesbrain]

Hi, I was happy to see there is a somewhat recent BIOS update for this model and was hoping it would allow boot to Windows from M.2 NVMe.  I have tried a few changes in configuration, but I'm not able to make this happen.  Windows will install to the M.2 drive, but does not boot upon restart.  Is what I'm trying to do not possible with this old PC?

Is there any way to boot to the HDD and immediately pass over to the M.2 drive to load Windows?  Thanks.

[VH2000]

What did you do? Step by step !

[Apesbrain]

Hi, thanks for your reply.  I purchased the PC refurbished and ran it for a bit to make sure everything was working.  I then updated the BIOS from 2012 to the latest V.3.08 and confirmed it.  I was discouraged at this point by not seeing NVMe as a boot option, but decided to move forward anyway.  I placed the NVMe drive in its PCI-e adapter and placed the adapter in an available PCI-e 4x slot (I also tried 16x).  I booted Windows 11 from an install USB and it offered the NVMe drive as a place to install.  I got to the first reboot during the install and, rather than resuming the install process, it restarted to the beginning of Windows install.  I tried another reboot, this time with the USB key removed from the PC and got a "OS not found" message.

Can you answer me this: is it possible for this PC/BIOS to boot Windows 10/11 from NVMe this way?  If so, I'm up for doing whatever is necessary to enable it.

[VH2000]

OK, I understand and I guess that in the beginning you ran the machine with WIN 10 on a SATA SSD.

To boot from PCIe and Sata are completely different things. But you can run a machine with this configuration. Boot from drive A and run WIN 11 from drive B. You can use the bootmanager from the A-Drive and run WIN from the B-Drive.

This works for WIN 10 and I did it many times without any problem!

So go back to your start config with the SATA drive and run WIN 10 and update it to 19043.1266

Run cmd (admin) with the 2 commands:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

sfc /scannow

Then reconnect the NVMe and look in the device manager. If everything is OK, reboot and select your USB with WIN11

Start the installation on the NVMe. This process will modify your WIN10 BCD and later you get the option to boot from WIN 10 or WIN 11.

[Apesbrain]

In the beginning, this PC had a 500GB SATA HDD with no OS installed.  I removed the HDD and installed an NVMe on a PCI-e adapter.

If I understand, you're saying it could be made to work if set up dual-boot on a Win 10 HDD.  I don't really need Win 10 on this PC.  Is it possible to have an HDD in place only to hold the MBR which would point to Win 11 on the NVMe?  Thanks.

[VH2000]

A long time ago I had just an USB-Stick with the MBR-Boot-Partition and the rest was on a HDD. It worked.

If your machine supplies UEFI you should select that. It's so easy. I don't know if WIN 11 is running on MBR or if GPT is necessary.

But to do all that you have to install WIN 10 on the HDD first. When you updated your drivers you can tranfer them later to WIN 11. 

[Apesbrain]

Ok, I'm going to put the SATA HDD back in the PC and image my old Win 10 install to it.  Hopefully, Win 10 will start and I'll deal with any issues in Device Manager and reauthorize the license.  Then, I'll install Win 11 dual-boot to the NVMe and set boot manager to default to Win 11.

Might take me a few days to get to this, but I'll report back.  Thanks for all your help.