Installing NVMe SSD

[onb]

That could be an option for testing. I will try it once I get back home.

What I did try so far is mounting the SSD in an external drive. (see this link for the drive)

Within this drive the new SSD works perfectly fine. I can even boot the system from the new SSD in the external drive. However curiously enough, the original SSD from my laptop is not recognised inside the external drive and can therefore not be booted from there.

[Petro_]

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@Huffer wrote:

@petroI am sure you mean well but there is no such BIOS setting. If the laptop will run with either SATA or NVME there is no need  to switch anything in the BIOS. 

The 512 gig you have is a Samsung XP941 which is a Gen 2 x4 M.2 SSD. The 970 Evo Plus is a 

• INTERFACE

  PCIe Gen 3.0 x4, NVMe 1.3

The answer must lie with this seemingly small difference. The motherboard must support PCIe gen 3.0 and since this hardware is the oldest I have seen running an NVME M.2 I can only surmise the system is not set to boot from such a disk. 

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Of course I mean well and I guess I'm not hiding my frustration well... 

How a manufacturer in 2015+ can deliver a hardware with so poor BIOS software is beyond me...

Every expert here is linking to a manual.pdf instead of shouting at HP with a pointing finger...

[Huffer]

There is no need for the BIOS to allow switching if the hardware allows use of either a SATA or NVME M.2 as some systems do and some do not. There is nothing to point a finger about. In this case when this laptop was made gen 3 x4 did not yet exist and the engineers who designed it did not foresee it. So no provision is made for it. I have that same USB-C to NVME adapter and have never found an NVME M.2 it would not work with. So this case presents a couple mysteries. 

[Petro_]

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@onb wrote:

That could be an option for testing. I will try it once I get back home.

What I did try so far is mounting the SSD in an external drive. (see this link for the drive)

Within this drive the new SSD works perfectly fine. I can even boot the system from the new SSD in the external drive. However curiously enough, the original SSD from my laptop is not recognised inside the external drive and can therefore not be booted from there.

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Hello again mate. i just wonder if you manage to boot from the NVMe?

I found this "Hack" that makes it possible to boot from any NVMe, just a headsup since I believe your BIOS dont recognize the stick properly.

I hope I'm wrong.

https://www.win-raid.com/t2375f50-Guide-NVMe-boot-without-modding-your-UEFI-BIOS-Clover-EFI-bootload...

[onb]

@Petro

I haven't gotten around yet to installing the new SSD again into the laptop for testing. I hope to try it all out till sunday evening. I will definitely keep you updated. That "Hack" sound really, really promissing! Thank's a lot.

[Huffer]

The bootloader thing will work if your laptop "sees" the NVME M.2 disk but just will not boot from it. If the problem is more fundamental i.e. neither the BIOS nor Windows even recognizes that the NVME M.2 is installed then this will not help. Post back and let us know if it works for you. 

[Petro_]

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@Huffer wrote:

The bootloader thing will work if your laptop "sees" the NVME M.2 disk but just will not boot from it. If the problem is more fundamental i.e. neither the BIOS nor Windows even recognizes that the NVME M.2 is installed then this will not help. Post back and let us know if it works for you. 

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On the first post in this thread it is said that a windows installation was possible and it's first faze installed without problems even if the drive didn't show up in BIOS.

It was during the restart things went pearshaped since the BIOS can't recognize the NVMe. The Windows installer does, it's looking for what is compatible hardware and not asking BIOS that question.

Reason it cant boot this restarted second time (first time it booted from the USB installation stick) is that the BIOS needs to tell the boot sector on the freshly installed NVMe-disc to execute. Since the BIOS is not up to date that will not happen...

That's why the hack above works, even on HP's none supported BIOS or old computers.

BIOS/UEFI->Clover-EFI->NvmExpressDxe-driver->bootpartition@NVMe-drive->OS

Now... If 0nb manages this and if the drive shows up as an NVMe with it's high speed tranfers in windows, -will there be any effort from the employees in this community to the software department for implanting NVMe to the BIOS directly?

[Maké]

Hi!, @Onb :

Your notebook, have possibility of install (depend of Serial Number in Motherboard) ...

128GB SATA III 6Gb/s TLC (Three Level Cell) NAND M.2 NGFF (2280) Solid State Drive - 788611-001
256GB PCIe Gen-2 x2 M.2 NGFF (2260) Solid State Drive - 788612-001
256GB SATA III 6Gb/s TLC (Three Level Cell) NAND M.2 NGFF (2280) Solid State Drive - 819489-001
512GB PCIe AHCI Gen-2.0 x4 MLC (Multiple level Cell) NAND M.2 NGFF (2280) Solid State Drive - 788613-001

The recognized brand are ... Sandisk, Samsung, Western Digital (WD), Crucial (by Micron), Kingston, SKhynix, Corsair, etc ...

[onb]

Alright, so I made a hugh leap forward yesterday thanks to @Petro_ !

Indeed I was able to boot with clover from my SSD!!!

I flowed the instructions of the link and it worked like a charm 🙂

The only difficulty I still have is, once I booted windows 10, I checked the file explorer to see if the SSD is recognised, which it only partially did. Meaning, the default "C" drive was just the pluged in USB with clover on it. The second drive was called "R" drive, which was only the Windows 10 boot partition of the new SSD in my laptop ( size = about in the order of 1GB). The remaining 3 other partitions on my disk where invisible. Still with my USB device being to small to support the whole OS installed, this means that it was actually running from the SSD.

I extracted the SSD once more after that and ran it in my external drive, checking with AOMEI Parition Assistant, what is on it. Therefore I can say all 4 Windows partitions have been created and are populated with the proper data.

I guess getting as far as booting windows from the SSD means it really is able to run just fine in this HP laptop, only that the default BIOS/ UEFI is incapable of handling the disk without clover. The rest of the way will now be some tinkering to recognise the full SSD as internal and all will be good. I will give it some more time to try out this last stap tonight.

@Petro_ , you are a genius, thanks a lot!

[Huffer]

Yes as I said the bootloader will work if the BIOS sees the NVME so you are right it must. Did you try removing the 2.5 hard drive? Is the NVME showing up in the BIOS now? Ultimately a bootloader defeats the purpose of an NVME M.2 since bootloaders are very slow to load. You want to get it working without a bootloader if possible and if the bootloader was able to be transferred to the NVME it is recognized on some level by your system.