New Installed M.2 SSD Not Showing in BIOS

[SuperEvilMegaCo]

I bought this machine, and it has a 1TB spinning HDD in it. So, I installed an m.2 SSD into the available slot to help with boot times and more rapid application launch, and I left the HDD in place.

I successfully cloned the OS onto the SSD using Samsung Data Migration. I can see the SSD in task manager. When I run F2 on restart, I can see the SSD under the "Hard Drive" part of the system information as well, just under my current HDD. But, when I go to BIOS to change the boot order, I cannot find a way to boot from the SSD.

I'd love to repurpose that slow spinning hard drive for bulk storage while the SSD handles me handle boot volume chores. How do I enable the SSD to boot in BIOS? I would very much appreciate some help with this.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

I'm not sure that you can clone a SATA based drive configuration onto a NVMe SSD.

NVMe SSD's use a totally different drive controller than SATA drives do.

Also, if you have an operating system on the 2.5" drive, the notebook will always want to boot from the 2.5" drive.

What I recommend you do is to:

Temporarily disconnect the 2.5" drive.

Either clean install W10 on the SSD using the media creation tool to create bootable installation media...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

...or use the HP cloud recovery tool to create a bootable USB recovery drive that hopefully will reinstall W10, the drivers and the software that originally came with your notebook.

Here is an info link for how to use that utility...

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06162205

You can see if your PC is supported by the cloud recovery tool at the link below.  It should be.

http://support.hp.cloud-recovery.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/

If you can get your NVMe drive working as a stanalone drive, and everything is great, hook up the 2.5" drive again and see what happens.

If it boots from the 2.5" drive, save any files you want to keep from the 2.5" drive, use the media creation tool to create installation media and do the initial steps to install Windows on the 2.5" drive.  Make sure you pick the right one!

Then when you get to the part that asks 'Where do you want to install Windows,' delete every partition on the hard drive, leaving just one partition of unallocated space, format the partition, exit out of the installer, shut down the PC, and your PC should boot from the NVMe drive and you should have a clean 2.5" drive just for storage.

[SuperEvilMegaCo]

Is there any way to do it without opening up my laptop again, removing the HDD, closing it, booting up my cloned copy, then opening the laptop to put the HDD back in there the second time?

I've seen tons of videos cloning SATA drives to NVMes successfully, and I've already done so successfully using Samsung's Data Migration. It's absolutely possible.

All I want to do is boot to SSD directly.

I don't understand why HP makes this so difficult - this works effortlessly for so many other computers.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Unfortunately, that I don't know.

I suppose you can just jump directly to formatting the 2.5" drive and hope the PC boots from the NVMe drive.

As long as there is an OS on the 2.5" drive it will always boot from that one first.

I have also read other posts maybe not regarding your model where the NVMe drive will only work if the hard drive is removed.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

One other thing...

Another forum member indicated the drive didn't show up in the BIOS, but boots from it anyway.

I don't remember what model notebook it was.