Hp Elite Book 850 G3 - Upgrade to NVME SSD

[thelearner21]

My HP EliteBook G3 is fitted with a 180 Gbyte SSD - M2 NGFF. 

I also have now fitted a 2.5" 256 Gbyte Sandisk SSD. 

I did email tech support to ask if my notebook would support an upgrade to an M2 NVME SSD, but never got any reply. 

I purchased a 1 TB Kingston M2 NVME SSD. I have cloned my existing drive to it, and fitted it to the laptop. The drive is recognised, but the laptop will not boot from it. 

I have gone to the boot menu - selected to boot from UEFI - it will not boot and tried from Legacy boot - also will not boot. 

I then booted from a W10 USB stick to get to command prompt and ran Diskpart and checked the hard drive. 

Volume 0 - C Drive - Windows NTFS - 487 Gbytes

Volume 1 - D Drive - Windows RE 980 Mbytes

Volume 2 - E Drive - Recovery IM 442 GB

Volume 3 - System - no drive letter

Appears to be a direct clone of my old 180 GB SSD - which is now back in the laptop. The Kingtson SSD works fine in the laptop and the caddy - just cannot get it to boot from the Kingston. It will also boot when the cloned image is put on the 2.5" Sandisk SSD.

In Windows I get the error code 0xc0000225 item missing when booting from the Kingston. 

I have the latest BIOS on the notebook  (still in warranty also) - but even although in Bios the language setting is English as soon as I go into the diagnostics menu - the language looks like Dutch. 

I also do not see any method to alter the boot sequence in the UEFI boot sequence menu. I can click and boot from that device - but cannot set the sequence. 

Would be grateful for any help or suggestions - either for the Kingston SSD booting or the Diagnostics language, or the UEFI boot sequence (tried the + and - keys).

Reason I want to upgrade is more space and to benefit from the much faster speed of NVME - if it is possible. 

[thelearner21]

This is the SSD I am trying to upgrade to 

https://www.kingston.com/unitedkingdom/en/ssd/kc2500-nvme-pcie-ssd

[thelearner21]

Still trying to get to the bottom of this. 

BIOS settings are all as machine was supplied. 

Legacy boot is enabled and secure boot is disabled. I have read that for new components secure boot needs to be disabled - but already set like this. 

Boot order is UEFI then Legacy - I disabled Legacy. Order of UEFI boot is 

USB - and it is seeing the Kingston 1 TB SSD in the caddy plugged in to the USB port. 

M2 SSD

Sata SSD

Legacy boot does not seem to be seeing the Kingston in the caddy

The device does not boot from the M2 - booting from M2 SSD. 

So I am wondering if it's windows UEFI settings that is preventing the new drive from being a boot drive? 

[thelearner21]

My next move was to Migrate the OS to the 1 tb Kingston using EaseUS - no change still did not boot from USB caddy. Installed Kingston SSD in the laptop on it's own - would not boot error 0xc000000e - which suggested the boot info in the UEFI portion of the hard drive is incorrect. 

I then booted from W10 USB and selected the repair options and let windows try and fix startup problems,  this failed. 

Then found this 

ou can also try rebuilding the BCD file manually and see if the PC boots fine.

1. Create a bootable media and boot the PC using the media.
2. On the Install Windows screen, select Next > Repair your computer.
3. On the System Recovery Options screen, select Troubleshoot> Advanced options > Command Prompt.
4. Now type in the commands and hit enter: BOOTREC /FIXMBR
   BOOTREC /FIXBOOT
   BOOTREC /scanos
   BOOTREC /rebuildbcd
5. Restart the PC.

Tried this but in the last 2 steps 0 Windows installations found, even though in diskpart using list volume 

Volume 0 was C windows and 

Volume 1 was D Windows RE

Now I am sure I would be able to do a fresh install of windows on the new SSD - but this i what I wanted to avoid, and I have been sold on how easy it is to buy a bigger hard drive and clone/install - obviously not the case. 

Have now spent hrs on this - Kingston SSD is back in the caddy 

I could clone a sata 2.5" SSD and boot from here no problem. Really wanted to use the NVME hard drive. Might try and find a bigger NGFF M2 SSD, and accept the lower transfer speeds. 

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

We could have probably saved you some effort. The 850 G3 does not support PCIe/NVME M.2. The 15u G3 mobile workstation, which is covered by the same service manual, does. This is of course confusing. Sorry for your troubles but you would likely have more luck in the future here at the Forum, where we are not generally HP employees, than trying to get upgrade questions answered by proper HP Support. 

[thelearner21]

Hi Huffer - thanks for that - funnily though the NVME drive worked perfectly in the laptop - only would not be a boot device although it was in the UEFI list in the BIOS. I guess though would only have been working at the same speed as the M2 NGFF Drive.

At least now I know - I did ask the q to HP support through their tech support - the query came back as closed with no answer. 

I also know my best option would probably be to get a 1TB 2.5" SATA hard drive as much easier to find than the m2 format NGFF - and possibly just keep windows and nothing else on the smaller m2 and use the other SATA for storage. 

I now have a very fast USB3  SSD now though!

[thelearner21]

Well I tired several things. 

Cloning, migrating OS did not work the Kingston 1 TB SSD simply would not boot - although it worked fine in the laptop slot, although was advised above not compatible. 

I then made an image file of windows using the windows backup imaging service, and fitted the Kingston in the M2 slot - and reinstalled the image booting from a W10 Pro UEFI USB disk. 

It would not install windows on the previous windows volume - but would on the spare part of the hard drive so did this and it booted into this no problem. 

Windows has now installed a Windows UEFI Boot manager - this is what is shown in the UEFI Bios - the newly installed Windows is in Volume 8 on the Kingston SSD, and the old imaged version is in Volume 4. 

It will not boot from volume 4 - and windows start up repair cannot make it boot from Volume 4. 

I thought I'd just pop back in the 180 GByte SSD and go back to the previous setup - but the laptop would not see this drive in the UEFI boot list - it was not connected by usb when I reinstalled windows. 

So I decided just to go with the new installation of Windows - it was much less painful than I thought - although in my outlook PST - which I back up regularly - I think I deleted my saved messages folder, have overwritten all my old copies, and my last archived back up was 20 months ago so have lost 20 months of backups. 

In future I am going to be using windows backup to backup my files daily in certain folders automatically. 

But the Kingston NVME drive certainly works in the motherboard - and I have tested the speed - and it is working at advertised speeds - 5 x faster than the SATA 2.5" hard drive. 

[Huffer]

This is good news. I kind of wondered how the workstation would accept NVME and other models using the same motherboard series would not. The Manual is incorrect and this is far from the first time we discover that. Still a bit confused as to why the clone did not work but yes a clean install is often the fool-proof way to get it to work. Thanks.