NVMe/M.2 drive not available as a boot drive in BIOS

[mamimum]

I am currently trying to turn my desktop pc into a good gaming pc. i wanted more storage, so i bought another hdd and a PCIe x1 adapter for an NVMe drive i had lying around and i cant manage to find out how to set it as a boot drive. In windows, it shows up and works just fine. i can run windows setup and install windows on it. it just wont boot because the BIOS has 0 support for an NVMe drive because it wasnt designed to handle one.  is there any boot manager or BIOS i can use to have that as a boot drive? 

My current bios version: v8.21

Current CPU I7-3770 3.40 GHZ

[banhien]

---

@mamimum wrote:

I am currently trying to turn my desktop pc into a good gaming pc. i wanted more storage, so i bought another hdd and a PCIe x1 adapter for an NVMe drive

---

@mamimum 

What is your NVMe SSD drive ?  I believe it should be PCIe x3 or PCIe x4. It doesn't make sense you use PCIe x1 adapter for PCIe x3 or PCIe x4 device. Are you sure this is going to work ?

Regards.

[mamimum]

my nvme drive is currently a crucial p2 m.2 2280 pcie gen3 

i am using a x1 adapter because my pc only has x1 slots, and the x16 is occupied by my gpu

[mamimum]

That and I already stated that it works just fine and i can see it in windows, i can interact with it, and i can install windows on it, but it wont boot because the bios doesnt support it

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi, @mamimum 

Since your PC's BIOS does not support booting from a NVMe SSD, your only possible solution to boot from the NVMe drive would be to try a software bootloader such as DUET/REFIND or clover.

Updated "Add NVME as Boot Drive using DUET/REFIND method" - HP Support Community - 7745966

How to boot from NVME using Clover - NVME PCIe Adapter - YouTube

You do realize that booting a PCIe 3 x 4 NVMe SSD from a PCIe x1 slot is only going to run at approximately 1/4 of its maximum read/write specs, correct?

That is going to be just a smidgen better performance than a SATA SSD will provide.

[mamimum]

i am aware of the speeds being axed a little bit, but its still faster than my current hdd

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Then I have given you the info you need to hopefully make your NVMe SSD work as a bootable device.

Good luck,

[Ivoryninja]

I had the same problem with my hp omen and a solution that might work for you is to download the Intel rapid storage drivers for your model and instead of installing it to the default C:\ folder install it to either the root of a usb installation disk or in the sources folder. when you get to the setup part where you choose where to install windows there will be an option to add driver. Go to the folder where the drivers were installed and you can use the inf files to add drivers and disk will appear...... hopefully 😁