ZBook Power 16 G11A – Secondary NVMe SSD Not Detected After Boot/Hibernation

[jasc7]

Hello,

I have an HP ZBook Power 16 G11A (AMD Ryzen 8845HS, BIOS W85 Ver. 01.08.00) with two NVMe SSDs installed:

• Primary: SK hynix BC901 HFS001TEJ9X108N (factory SSD, works fine)

• Secondary: YMTC PC411 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD (1TB)

The OS infomation is shown below:

• OS: Windows 11 Home China
• OS Version: 26100.6725

Issue

• The secondary SSD is often not detected at cold boot.

• It does not appear in Windows Explorer, Device Manager, or even as a PCIe device.

• If I enter the BIOS setup and then exit, the SSD reappears.

• After hibernation, the SSD disappears again.

• Tested in a USB–NVMe enclosure → the SSD works normally.

Steps Already Tried

• Disabled Bitlocker, Secure Boot, Fast Boot, and Windows Fast Startup.

• Disabled hibernation via powercfg /hibernate off.

• Verified SSD health and partitions.

Observation

This looks like a BIOS/firmware initialization issue. The fact that the SSD appears only after a BIOS reinit strongly suggests PCIe/NVMe reinitialization is not happening correctly at boot or after resume.

Request

Could this be escalated to HP Workstation BIOS/Firmware Engineering?
I would like to know if:

1. This is a known NVMe compatibility issue on the ZBook Power 16 G11A.

2. There are recommended BIOS/firmware updates or settings to ensure stable PCIe 4.0 NVMe initialization.

3. PCIe power management/ASPM handling could be related.

Thanks in advance for any help from HP engineers or others who have faced the same issue.

— jasc7

[TzortzisG]

Hello jasc7.

Unfortunately HP laptops/workstations are known for their notoriously badly written UEFI firmware and the many bugs it has -some are fixed along the way. Among the other issues, compatibility issues with lesser known RAM and SSD brands is often seen. Since requests for updated BIOS versions to support the many different brands of memory and storage usually produce no results, most of us just choose from one of the major companies (Crucial, Kingston, WD, etc) that usually give some kind of guarantee of compatibility....