[SOLVED] Are m.2 drives easily disabled?

[seogoat]

Can you completely disable and enable m.2 drives nvme easily. For example if there were two drives installed with one that boots from a linux install and one that boots from a windows install. Ideally would just like to be able to tell the bios to either boot from this one or the other one and completely ignore one of them. Just wondered if anyone had experience with this.

 

[Lafong]

Do you see any possible control for that in your own BIOS?

 

[seogoat]

Do you see any possible control for that in your own BIOS?

Don't have a mobo that has m.2 yet. Have never used them before. Just doing a bit of research before getting one as to whether there are any issues using them.

 

[Lafong]

10 minutes of Google says it is problematic.....possibly doable on some boards with some BIOS versions.

Device Manager might also be a place you could disable a drive. Never tried it.

 

[seogoat]

For my particular requirement, it could just be better to use 2 sata ssds with 1 cable and switch as required then. Still get much better performance that an hdd i suppose. Always used an hdd up until now. The board im thinking of getting is: asus prime z690-p d4

 

[Lafong]

I'd guess you are much more likely to have full control over SATA drives with cables than with NVMe attached direct to the board......

So, maybe you can use 2 cables and leave both SATA drives connected all the time and just disable in the BIOS as desired when booting?

You might be able to hammer out some details on that specific Asus board online somewhere....maybe even from Asus support direct, if they are responsive at all.

 

[seogoat]

Thanks for your help Lafong. May use 2. Depends upon whether windows 10 interferes with linux mint. Recently had a dual boot with windows 10 and linux mint. Each time windows 10 booted it seemed to completely remove linux mint from the boot priority list in the bios.

 

[Krotow]

M.2 drives doesn't particularly differ from other storage drives. If your BIOS is UEFI capable, you can install any OS you want on particular drive, set one of them to boot on default and choose another from UEFI boot prompt. Or configure OS choice via Linux GRUB boot menu. Either way works. Particularly my home PC have two M.2 drives with Linux Mint + Windows 10 in dualboot and OS choice via GRUB boot menu. Works like charm.

 

[dwd999]

Thanks for your help Lafong. May use 2. Depends upon whether windows 10 interferes with linux mint. Recently had a dual boot with windows 10 and linux mint. Each time windows 10 booted it seemed to completely remove linux mint from the boot priority list in the bios.

Its always better when you have 2 operating systems to install 1 at a time with no knowledge that there's another system. What I do to achieve this is use Macrium to create an image of disk 1 and then delete all of the partitions on disk 1 so it appears unallocated. Then I install the other system on disk 2, and after that's complete I reload the image onto disk 1 so that I have 2 totally independent operating systems. I can then use the BIOS booting option to switch between them as you normally would.