[SOLVED] BIOS won't show newly installed M.2 SSD on boot priority ?

[norpba]

Hi,

I'll start this thread by saying that I've spent hours on google and not found a solution for my problem and that this is my first build in 8 years and also my first time encountering such a problem.

I finished my build yesterday and currently have two old sata-connected SSDs on my pc and two m.2 NVMe SSDs (one of the m.2 SSDs is 500gb in size and the other one is 1Tb). The 500Gb m.2 SSD was in my old system with win10 installed on it, no problems there. I had it connected on my system while installing a fresh copy of windows on my new 1Tb m.2. Windows installed fine, I transferred all important documents and music from my two old SSDs and from the 500gb old m.2 to the newly installed 1Tb m.2. What I had in mind was to transfer everything from these three old drives to the new 1Tb m.2 and then format the old drives and sort my music into the old drives (now formatted.)

After transferring the important files to the newly installed 1Tb M.2 SSD, I rebooted my pc and went into the bios. For some reason I used ASUS Secure Erase and not the windows disk utility and formatted all the old drives, both 250gb SSD's and the 500gb m.2 SSD. After the last restart and while entering the BIOS, I notice that the 1Tb drive is not showing up on the boot list and what ever I try, I can not get it to boot. Did I mess up by formatting the old m.2 SSD with windows on it? I read somewhere that they might share some partitions.

This is my first post on any PC forum anywhere, so please be kind.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Colif]

why are they showing as raid?

It could be the nvme is showing on another page of the BIOS, perhaps under storage

it should show up on the NVMe config page, see page 67 - https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/...UF_GAMING_INTEL_700_Series_BIOS_EM_WEB_EN.pdf

if m.2 doesn't have windows on it, it won't show in boot priority as you can't boot off it.

 

[norpba]

why are they showing as raid?

It could be the nvme is showing on another page of the BIOS, perhaps under storage

it should show up on the NVMe config page, see page 67 - https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/...UF_GAMING_INTEL_700_Series_BIOS_EM_WEB_EN.pdf

I really don't know, I saw that as well and went to check the settings, but it's showing that they are not in raid? Also NVMe settings show that it doesn't recognize it as an NVMe drive?

 

[norpba]

Also when I try and boot up the windows installation media, it doesn't find any drives. This is starting to look bad..

 

[Colif]

The 500Gb m.2 SSD was in my old system with win10 installed on it, no problems there. I had it connected on my system while installing a fresh copy of windows on my new 1Tb m.2.

well, that could be 1 reason why it can't find the drive in boot listing as it was possible the boot partition was put on the 500gb hdd and after you formatted it, you lost that.

Take out all drives except the NVMe and try that again.

 

[norpba]

well, that could be 1 reason why it can't find the drive in boot listing as it was possible the boot partition was put on the 500gb hdd and after you formatted it, you lost that.

Take out all drives except the NVMe and try that again.

Should I also remove the 500gb NVMe? And what should happen when I do that? Wasn't the boot partition lost and the windows installation media won't find any drives connected to the PC.

 

[Colif]

depends, has it got windows on it? if it does, take it out.
is it full? if there is no unallocated space on the drive, windows might not use it.

But safest choice is only have 1 drive in.

 

[norpba]

depends, has it got windows on it? if it does, take it out.
is it full? if there is no unallocated space on the drive, windows might not use it.

But safest choice is only have 1 drive in.

All of the three other drives connected have been formatted. I tried booting up diskpart, but even that won't find any drives connected.

 

[norpba]

Alright, I feel so stupid. I didn't know what RAID was short for, so I had that enabled on the main page of the BIOS all along..

I disabled it and now it looks like this

I still doesn't show any other boot option other than the installation media, but now the installation media etc recognize the drives. Can I somehow recover the partition that I used with the 1Tb / 500gb NVMe's ?

 

[Colif]

Can I somehow recover the partition that I used with the 1Tb / 500gb NVMe's ?

what do you mean?
i see the 1tb drive is gpt and full.
the 500gb drive is empty. according to that. unless its got a really small boot partition on it. Its difficult to say from a list disk. What does list vol show?

Disk 4 being USB drive

 

[norpba]

what do you mean?
i see the 1tb drive is gpt and full.
the 500gb drive is empty. according to that. unless its got a really small boot partition on it. Its difficult to say from a list disk. What does list vol show?

Disk 4 being USB drive

From what I understand that happened is that I formatted the 500Gb NVMe which included the windows boot partition. What I meant is that can I somehow recover that boot partition or do I just create the efi to that 500Gb NVMe?

that 110gb ssd is yet another old one that I hooked up just to see if it changed anything.

 

[Colif]

We should be able to create a EFI on the 1tb drive if that is where you want windows to be.

makes more sense to only have 1 drive attached when you do it.

diskpart
• list disk
• select disk x (x represents the sequence number of the disk where an EFI partition is required)
• list partition
• select partition n (n represent the sequence number of the partition to be shrunk)
• shrink desired=500 (shrink the partition by 500MB)

Create EFI partition CMD

Now, create an EFI system partition by using the unallocated space with the command lines below.

• create partition efi
• format fs=fat32 quick
• assign letter=Y
• exit (exit diskpart.exe)
type:
bcdboot C:\windows /s Y:

link

 

[norpba]

type select disk 2
list part

i got you to give me wrong info before.

we should be able to create a EFI on the 1tb drive if that is where you want windows to be.

There we go. The thing is that I can't make a partition here since "Primary" partition is using rest of the space on the NVMe.

This NVMe contains everything from the other disks that I formatted before and I really wouldn't like to lose 15 years worth of photos. I understand this was my mistake tho.

 

[Colif]

i edited post, look at quote. You might be able to do that.

You might be able to resize part 2.

 

[norpba]

i edited post, look at quote. You might be able to do that.

You might be able to resize part 2.

Should I disconnect the other drives before I do anything? They do not contain any data tho.

 

[Colif]

Since you pick a particular drive to do the actions on, It really should only touch the one drive. So they should be fine.

 

[norpba]

Since you pick a particular drive to do the actions on, It really should only touch the one drive. So they should be fine.

Alright, one last question before I shrink the drive. While looking for an answer myself, I converted the 500Gb NVMe from basic to GPT. Is there a way to convert it back to basic, or can I do that when I get back to windows? What I'm asking is that will it affect the EFI that I'm going to create now.

 

[norpba]

We should be able to create a EFI on the 1tb drive if that is where you want windows to be.

makes more sense to only have 1 drive attached when you do it.




link

I got this. Did I do something wrong?

 

[Colif]

Alright, one last question before I shrink the drive. While looking for an answer myself, I converted the 500Gb NVMe from basic to GPT. Is there a way to convert it back to basic, or can I do that when I get back to windows? What I'm asking is that will it affect the EFI that I'm going to create now.

it doesn't make any difference. GPT is a disk format, it doesn't make it bootable or anything
too much info below:

Spoiler

Explanation of terms:

UEFI - Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
If your PC is less than 11 years old, you have a UEFI bios now

In 2006 or so Intel decided the bios as it was at time was too limited and needed to be replaced so that it supported newer technologies as they were invented

By about 2009 a consortium of hardware makers had combined to create UEFI standard

• Old bios were limited, they didn't know what a mouse was for, so everything was keyboard driven
• they weren't expandable, everything had to fit in a small amount of memory
• they only supported Master Boot Record (MBR) which can only have 4 partitions per drive (there are tricks to get around this) and max drive size is 2.2 tb

UEFI bios overcame all the limitations of legacy bios (as it came to be called)

• it supports mouse,
• it has a GUI so it looks better than previous bios could
• Its expandable, it can be added to to grow as new hardware is created.
• UEFI supports MBR & GPT Drives

GPT = GUID Partition Table
GUID = Global Unique ID = Every GPT drive on earth has a unique ID
GPT drives can have a max of 255 partitions on them
Max size of a GPT drive/partition is 18.8 million TB

Failure when attempting to copy boot files...
Well, why isn't anything ever easy
try typing these commands and see if they help

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd

 

[norpba]

it doesn't make any difference. GPT is a disk format, it doesn't make it bootable or anything
too much info below:

Spoiler

Explanation of terms:

UEFI - Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
If your PC is less than 11 years old, you have a UEFI bios now

In 2006 or so Intel decided the bios as it was at time was too limited and needed to be replaced so that it supported newer technologies as they were invented

By about 2009 a consortium of hardware makers had combined to create UEFI standard

• Old bios were limited, they didn't know what a mouse was for, so everything was keyboard driven
• they weren't expandable, everything had to fit in a small amount of memory
• they only supported Master Boot Record (MBR) which can only have 4 partitions per drive (there are tricks to get around this) and max drive size is 2.2 tb

UEFI bios overcame all the limitations of legacy bios (as it came to be called)

• it supports mouse,
• it has a GUI so it looks better than previous bios could
• Its expandable, it can be added to to grow as new hardware is created.
• UEFI supports MBR & GPT Drives

GPT = GUID Partition Table
GUID = Global Unique ID = Every GPT drive on earth has a unique ID
GPT drives can have a max of 255 partitions on them
Max size of a GPT drive/partition is 18.8 million TB

Failure when attempting to copy boot files...
Well, why isn't anything ever easy
try typing these commands and see if they help

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd

 

[Colif]

other option is, if this just gets annoying, is put windows on one of the other drives? you still have all the data on 1tb drive.

 

[norpba]

other option is, if this just gets annoying, is put windows on one of the other drives? you still have all the data on 1tb drive.

I would like to keep windows on the newer 1Tb nvme since it's a pro model and the other NVMe is a lot older. I'll do that if we can't figure out a way to fix this tho. Tell me if you have any other trick up your sleeve.

 

[Colif]

you replied while i was typing last answer

 

[Colif]

wait, thats wrong answer

 

[norpba]

wait, thats wrong answer

Welp, it's doing the chkdsk part right now.
ETA 45 minutes