Boot order on NVME m.2 SSD in HP EliteDesk 800 G4 TWR - grateful for advice

[ASH2755]

This is a bit beyond my ability so struggling a bit to get the PC to boot from the m.2 which it will do as long as the two 3.5 SATA drives are unplugged and as soon as I put them back again it is rebooting from one of them as it is a clone of the c drive. So I guess I could take the OS off the 3.5 and it would boot from the m.2? Or would it? 

It would be better though if I could understand why the boot order is not correct. I suspect it is to do with UEFI and Legacy but not been able to work it out as in spite of looking into it, have not been able to figure it out. (Nor why the Samsung 980 appears twice? I do have another m.2 in a flash drive but it was not attached at the time. One of the SATA drives also seems to appear twice? )

Please see attached which is the boot order with just the m.2 and then the boot order after attaching the two 3.5 SATA drives. Would be most grateful for any advice. Thank you.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

AFIK, if you want to use the M.2 SSD as the primary boot drive, you cannot have Windows on the SATA drives.

The Windows boot manager determines what drive to boot from and as long as a SATA drive has an OS on it, the PC will always boot from the SATA drive first.

It doesn't matter what boot order you place the drives in in the F10 BIOS boot options menu.

It happens all the time when folks install M.2 SSD's in notebook PC's that also have SATA drives.

If there is a way to do it, I don't know what it is, and I have yet to find any posts over the last several years (since M.2 SSD's came out), where someone could select the M.2 SSD to boot from with Windows on the SATA hard drive.

[ASH2755]

Thank you very much for this.

I know a G3 is different but I had trouble booting with an m.2 on there and got someone to fix it. What he did was fix it so that on start-up I get an option to start with the m.2 SSD or the 3.5 SATA. Dk if that would work on a G4? It was complicated and not even sure how he did it but it meant booting into the BIOS and a long list of files to do with the boot order.

I just would like to ask one more thing which would probably be some type of workaround. The PC can be booted up with the m.2 but not with the 3.5 attached so then how could the OS on the 3.5 disk be deleted?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

I wouldn't know of any workarounds.

I'm not sure how to delete the OS from the drive without removing it and installing it in a USB hard drive enclosure and formatting it.

You might just be able to unplug the data cable from the drive, be in Windows on the NVMe SSD, plug the data cable back into the hard drive so it shows up in Windows and use the disk management utility to delete all of the partitions on the drive and format it and use it for storage.