HP Pavilion 500-326na

[DJK53]

I have a pair of 2014 Pavilion 500-326na PC's that are still going well and are used for basic tasks such as web browsing and word processing.

I'd like to move one into ny home music studio, so want to remove the old hard drive and replace it with an M2 NVME drive to quiet it down as well as speed it up a little.

These machines have done well so far and both have 16Gb of memory and have had the CPU's swapped out for a10 7800's. They are running W11 24H2

Now I know I can just swap the current HDD for a SSD drive but as I have a PCIE adapter and 256Gb NVME drive I'd prefer to go that way.

I've installed the card and drive in one of the machines and whilst the BIOS doesn't see it Windows 11 does, which is leading me to think that the problem lies in the BIOS, which is Revision ORC v80.00 dated 06/24/2014. I'm assuming the BIOS has never been updated.

ANyone have any thoughts on where I can go from here, aside from installing an SS as my C drive and using the NVME as drive D.

I also have a problem loading W111 onto an HP dc580 but will post a separate question for that one

[Nal_NR · Accepted solution]

Hi @DJK53,

Welcome to the HP Support Community. 

I'd be glad to help you! 

It's great to see that your Pavilion 500-326na PCs are still performing well and being put to good use in your home music studio. It can be frustrating when hardware upgrades don't go as planned, especially when BIOS limitations get in the way. Let's look into possible solutions to make your NVMe drive work as intended.

• Does the NVMe drive appear in Windows Disk Management, and have you initialized/formatted it?
• Have you checked if there are any available BIOS updates for your system that might improve NVMe support?
• Is your PCIe adapter installed in a compatible slot that supports booting, or is it limited to storage use only?

Let's try these steps. 

Check for BIOS Updates:

• Visit HP's official support website and search for BIOS updates for your Pavilion 500-326na.
• If an update is available, install it and check if the BIOS recognizes the NVMe drive afterward.

Enable UEFI Boot Mode:

• Enter BIOS by pressing F10 during startup and check if there's an option to enable UEFI boot instead of Legacy mode.
• NVMe drives usually require UEFI boot to be recognized properly.

Manually Set Boot Order:

• Some older BIOS versions don't natively detect NVMe drives in the boot list.
• If Windows recognizes the drive, try using bcdboot commands to manually set it as a boot option by opening Command Prompt in admin mode and running:

Use NVMe as a Secondary Drive:

• If the BIOS does not support booting from NVMe, consider using an SSD as the primary boot drive and the NVMe as a high-speed secondary storage drive for music files and software.

Test Different PCIe Slots:

• Some older motherboards have limitations on which PCIe slots support bootable devices.
• Try moving the NVMe adapter to different slots to check if the BIOS detects it in another location.

If none of these steps work, you might need to consider keeping the NVMe drive for secondary storage while using a SATA SSD for boot purposes.

If you need further guidance, will share that in the next post.

Hope this helps! Keep me posted for further assistance

Please mark this post as “Accepted Solution” if the issue is resolved and if you feel this reply was helpful click “Yes”.

[Nal_NR]

Hi @DJK53,

Since your Pavilion 500-326na's BIOS likely doesn't support booting from an NVMe drive, the best approach is to use a SATA SSD as your primary boot drive while utilizing the NVMe as a high-speed secondary storage drive for your music files and software. Here’s how you can set it up:

Step 1: Install the SATA SSD as the Boot Drive

Physically install the SATA SSD:

• Power off your PC and unplug it.
• Connect the SATA SSD to an available SATA port on the motherboard and plug in a SATA power cable from the power supply.
• Secure the drive inside the case.

Initialize and format the SSD:

• Boot into Windows using your current hard drive.
• Press Win + X and select Disk Management.
• Find the new SSD, right-click it, and select "Initialize Disk."
• Choose GPT (GUID Partition Table) for UEFI systems or MBR if your system still uses Legacy BIOS.
• Create a new partition and format it as NTFS.

Step 2: Clone Your Existing OS to the SATA SSD

Use cloning software:

• Download a free tool such as Macrium Reflect, EaseUS Todo Backup, or AOMEI Backupper.
• Clone your existing HDD to the SSD to transfer Windows, applications, and files.
• After cloning, shut down the PC and disconnect the old HDD temporarily to test booting from the SSD.

Set the SATA SSD as the primary boot device:

• Restart your PC and press F10 to enter the BIOS.
• Go to Boot Options and set the SATA SSD as the first boot device.
• Save changes and exit.

Step 3: Configure the NVMe Drive as Secondary Storage

Ensure NVMe is recognized:

• Open Device Manager and check under "Disk drives" to confirm Windows detects the NVMe drive.

Initialize and format the NVMe drive:

• Go to Disk Management again.
• Right-click the NVMe drive, select "New Simple Volume," and assign a drive letter (e.g., 😧 or E:).
• Format it using the NTFS file system for optimal performance.

Set NVMe as default storage location:

• Open Settings > System > Storage > Change where new content is saved.
• Change locations for "Documents," "Music," and "Videos" to the NVMe drive.

Step 5: Final Testing and Cleanup

• Ensure everything works correctly before wiping the old HDD.
• Once satisfied with the setup, you can format the old HDD or use it for backups.

Hope this helps! Keep me posted for further assistance

Please mark this post as “Accepted Solution” if the issue is resolved and if you feel this reply was helpful click “Yes”.

[DJK53]

Thank you for the help.

I have ordered sn SSD to use as my C drive and will use the MVMe drive gor apps and the small amount of data produces as I think that will be the easiest way forward. 

The drive should be here in a few days and I'll come back and update everyone.

Thanks again all the help.

[NonSequitur777]

@DJK53,

Welcome to our HP Community forum!

Unfortunately, you cannot make an M.2 NVMe SSD work as a primary (boot) drive in your HP Pavilion 500-326na (G9C37EA) as fitted with the Hewlett-Packard 2B17 motherboard.

Your PC is simply too ancient to make that happen.

Best solution is to make a SATA SSD your primary (boot) drive.

Kind Regards,

NonSequitur777

[DJK53]

First can I thank everyone for their help and suggestions, they helped a lot.

If anyone is interested this is what I ended up doing.

I had a 128Gb SSD which I installed and was going to be my "silent" boot drive, along with the NVMe drive for my apps and data. At first glance this seemed a simple process but as the Pavilion is an unsupported Windows 11 machine, things rapidly became challenging. Whichever way I tried to get things set up the process would fail, usually asking for the Windows Licence key.

I even extracted the licence key and tried using that when prompted, but this too failed.

I ended up using DiskGenius, a free drive migration tool, to migrate the Windows system from the old drive to the SSD. Before doing this I removed the PCIe NVMe drive just to be sure that it didn't end up in the migration.

Suffice to say all went well, aside from my boot drive is now D and my data drive C but I'll get round to swapping them later.

As a byproduct of doing all this Windows now boots a lot lot faster.

Thanks again to everyone for their help.

David