UEFI bios does not find newly installed Samsung 980 m.2 ssd

[JustSayCJ]

I have to turn on legacy support to boot into my ssd, however that turns off secure boot. And I need secure boot enabled to update to windows 11, however when I do that legacy support is off and I can't boot at all. The hard drive check from diagnostics says my smart check has passed but it doesn't even start the short DST, it gives a warning instead but doesn't say what warning

[tk_srq]

@JustSayCJ,

 If your laptop boots into Windows only when legacy support is enabled, the Samsung M.2 SSD may be set up as an MBR (not GPT) partitioned drive. You can use the link below to figure out which type of partition scheme the drive has via either Disk Management or Diskpart command.

How to check if drive uses GPT or MBR partition style on Windows 10 - Pureinfotech

As to a warning you received from HP diagnostics test, you can run a diagnostic scan from Samsung Magician. If it detects any malfunctions, it may provide a report with more details.

Samsung Magician Software | Samsung US

Let us know what you find.

[JustSayCJ]

Thanks for your reply. According to Disk Management, the drive is set as MBR. How can I turn it into GPT without losing data? Or is that not possible?

Samsung Magician gave no errors whatsoever for my drive, health status is 100%

[tk_srq · Accepted solution]

@JustSayCJ,

You can use the mbr2gpt command that needs to be run in command prompt to convert mbr to gpt without data loss. You need to do the following prep work first:

1.  Your mbr disk has to have no more than three partitions. Go back to Disk Management to find out how many partitions are on the disk. You should see at least three partitions:  System Reserved, Windows partition (c:\ drive) and Recovery. If you see any other partition, you need to delete it.

2.  If the disk is on BitLocker, you need to suspend it.

3.  If the laptop has any other disk besides the Samsung M.2 ssd, please remove it.

4.  You shouldn't lose any data but save all important data to an external drive.

Follow the steps below for the conversion:

1.  Run command prompt as administrator.

2.  At the prompt type mbr2gpt /validate /allowfullos and click enter.

This command line examines and validates the disk. If it is ready for conversion, you'll see the message "validation completed successfully" (see the screenshot below). If you see an error here, you cannot proceed to the next command line. Send us a screenshot of the error.

3.  Type mbr2gpt /convert /allowfullos and click enter. 

If the conversion runs successful, a message will be displayed "You need to switch the firmware to boot to UEFI mode."

4.  Type exit and restart the laptop.

5.  Go into bios to turn legacy support disabled and save and exit. Now the laptop boots Windows in UEFI mode with secure boot being enabled.

When I did a mbr2gpt conversion, I referred to the following articles and you may take a look:

MBR2GPT - Windows Deployment | Microsoft Learn

MBR2GPT: Converting MBR to GPT Disk in Windows 10 | Windows OS Hub (woshub.com)

[JustSayCJ]

Sorry for the late reply, something came in between. I tried what you suggested and am now happily running Windows 11 on my laptop. Thanks!