Can Z440 support a 970 NVMe PCIe boot disk?

[yebligs]

I have run out of C drive on the 256Gb SM951 M.2 drive that came in my Z440 on a PCIe 4x adaptor card.

I purchased a Samsung 970 500Gb M.2 SSD, as the SM951 500Gb is no longer available. But I did not realise that the 951 was running AHCI mode, not NVMe. 

I have cloned the SM951 to the 970 successfully and the OS can see it as a drive. But if I select the 970 as boot drive I get a BIOS POST error message "928-Fatal PCIe error. PCIe error detected. Surprise link down error. Completion timeout on Slot 4."

Following this, the card is disabled and the drive can no longer be seen in Windows until the system is powered off and restarted

.

Is this due to the card being AHCI only and I need to get a NVMe PCIe 4x adaptor, or is the 970 not bootable by the BIOS, even with a full NVMe M.2 Gen3 PCIe 4x adaptor?

Any help or ideas much appreciated.

[DGroves]

the HP z440 supports AHCI and also NVME

second, the SM951 ssd's are still available in both AHCI and NVME interfaces from various venders, although you might have to search a bit for the AHCI version

i suspect your are trying to clone a bootable SSD that was configured as a MBR type partition, check partition manager do you see 2 or 3 partitions or four partitions?  if less than 4 it's MBR, and NVME requires GPT (4 partitions)

as such, you can not clone a bootable MBR, drive onto a  NVME type drive that requires GPT format and have it work

you will have to install the new nvme drive by itself (remove all other drives)with UEFI enabled in the bios install windows using GPT (set the z440 bios back to defaults if nessary) 

once windows is installed on the new device, you can buy another carrier for the sm951 install it and copy the needed files off it

[yebligs]

Thanks for your prompt and useful reply.

I did find a few options for 951 AHCI on Ebay but at prices greater than the 970, so I'd rather get the 970 working than buy another.

I have investigated further and although DISKPART only shows 3 partitions on the 970, when I look with a 3rd party partition manager such as Active@ or EaseUS Partition Manager, then 6 are shown. (3 additional 1Mb Unallocated).
Windows Disk Management, Properties, also shows the target disk as GPT. However the disk I am cloning from (originally the SM951 but now that is cloned to a 860 SSD SATA that I am currently booting off) is MBR, as you expected.

Therefore I will follow your suggestion that I do a fresh Windows install to the 970 to get a working GPT boot, and then attempt to restore a file backup of just the C partition to it.

I will update this thread to resolved when successful.

Thanks again.

[SESA207478]

Hey everyone,

I'd like to install a Samsung 1TB 970 EVO NVMe M.2 internal SSD with PCIe 3.0 x4 interface as the bootable disk and OS.

My Z440 has an Intel Chipset C612. The Chipset supports..

2 PCIe x16 Gen 3
1 PCIe x8 Gen 3

1 PCIe x1 Gen 2

1 PCIe x4 Gen 2
1 PCI Slot

Will the Z440 allow an M.2 NVMe as the bootable OS?

Will the Samsung card require an adapter?