Trying to install Samsung 980 M2 NVMe

[sherip99]

I bought a new 500 gb Samsung 980 M2 NVMe (not the Pro version). Also an M2 enclosure that enabled me to quickly clone the original drive with Macrium 8 free edition. Before cloning I changed the drive from MBR to GPT in Windows.

It is my understanding that you do not need a samsung driver for this model. Also that Windows 11 natively supports NVMe's. I did recently upgrade from 10 to 11.

My system has only one slot. The original drive is a Samsung 120 gb M2 Sata. When I installed the new drive, it was not detected in BIOS.

BIOS showed

-------------------------------

Intel (R) RST 17.5.5.4401 RAID Driver

No disks connected to system

--------------------------------

The originial drive (when installed) had shown up on that screen as a "Non-RAID Physical Disk"

I also tried disabling secure boot and enabling Legacy support but still couldn't get it boot.

System is a 14-dq1033cl with an i5 and 16gb ram.

Edit: learned boot drive must be GPT in Windows 11 and Legacy support is only for MBR.

Help?

[ub6424]

Hello @sherip99 

(1) Update BIOS

HP Notebook System BIOS Update (AMD Processors)

F.20 Rev.A

12.3 MB

Apr 20, 2022

Download

HP service manual:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c07012038.pdf

From page 35 ...

Please report your results.

best regards

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[sherip99]

Your references seem to be for AMD systems where mine is Intel based.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi, @sherip99 

First make sure that you have firmly seated the NVMe SSD in the slot.

Sometimes you may think you have, but you didn't.

If you are sure the drive is firmly seated in the slot, there are some HP notebooks where the NVMe SSD does not show up in the BIOS.

Sometimes cloning a SATA configuration to a NVMe drive doesn't work because the NVMe SSD uses a different drive controller.

So, what I recommend you do is to make a bootable W10 installation flash drive with the media creation tool from the link below.

Download Windows 10 (microsoft.com)

Boot from the USB flash drive the tool created and see if Windows will find the NVMe SSD and install.

BIOS update...If you feel a BIOS update is warranted, then this is the one you need.

Driver - HP Notebook 14-dq1033cl | HP® Customer Support

[sherip99]

Had gone back and forth between old and new drives several times, am confident it was firmly seated. As I said,  the drive name showed up on the F9 boot options page when Legacy was enabled in BIOS. See image below for my BIOS/system info. I presume this BIOS Revision F .25 was offered by the Support Assistant at some point when I was still running Windows 10 but the version number is greater than the one seen on your link.

Apparently some systems allow an M2 to be configured for either SATA or PCIe in BIOS but I can't find such setting in mine.

I have cleaned the disk via the enclosure and am getting ready to try again. I've prepared a Windows 11 bootable media. Sadly my USB ports are too close together to plug in both the Windows media and a mouse so will have to use a slow hub. The track pad wasn't working on when I first booted the media. If it works it will be slow lol. I guess if it fails to find the drive I'll put a simple gpt volume on the drive and try again.

[sherip99]

Got thru the initial setup of Windows 11. But Windows update got stuck and update history showed failure installing an Intel SCSI driver. As I said it seemed stuck on the rest of the updates, so attempted a restart. It warned me again to keep the computer on but I did a hard reset. Had no video display, but managed to get the startup menu. I ran a diagnostic and saw a short DST "Warning". Not feeling too confident, but just completed a Recovery reset. If possible I will attempt to avoid updates and see if I can restore a Macrium image backup of the old drive.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Unfortunately, I don't know what the problem could be.

The service manual indicates that both SATA and NVMe SSD's are supported.

Hopefully you will be able to get the NVMe drive to work.

[sherip99]

I had hoped restoring an image to the drive while it was installed in the system might work better than cloning to it in the enclosure, but there was no difference. It wouldn't boot with same BSOD.

Have again installed Windows 11 from scratch and waited out Windows update. Will probably back this up and try a Samsung migration tool tomorrow. If migration fails, hopefully I can restore and get back to where I am now. Then I'll start trying to get drivers squared away and software reinstalled. If result is unsatisfactory I'll return the drive.

[sherip99 · Accepted solution]

I went down many rabbit holes but I ultimately got a clone (actually a restored macrium image) to boot.

Among other things:

I used DISM to capture drivers from an offline windows disk and added them them en masse to my clean install of Windows. That worked, and hardware like backlit keyboard and sound controls started working again. Backed that up. Before doing it, I also captured drivers from the new install plus Windows Update.

I restored a backup I had made of my original Sata M2 and added the aforementioned captured drivers. Had high hopes, but no joy.

Then I think I was in the recovery area available from the Windows Install Media. From thre I opted to restart with special options - Safe Mode. Went into the Device Manager and tried to remove Intel RST driver. If I were doing it again, I'd try to use DISM to remove that driver with the disk offline. As it was, the system hung and I had to power off. Chkdsk errors. But wonder of wonders, it booted after that. The Intel driver either came back or is still there, but now the drive boots. Whew! I was reminded of the days of autoexec,bat and config.sys.