Question Booting windows from M.2 NVMe on MSI MB

[wizkid96]

Hello everyone,
Yesterday I started trying to clone my Windows 11 to a new M.2 NVMe that I bought (you can see the Reddit post here) but was not able to get anywhere with this so I decided to just do a clean install.
I have pretty much tried everything I could find here and on other forums but I can’t get the M.2 to work….
I have a UFEI bootable flash drive, tried using both slots on the MB, tried changing settings in BIOS (as suggested here) and many other things which I can’t remember anymore because it’s 3 AM while I’m writing this…

What I can say is that in disk manager I can see that there are partitions created after installing win11 and I can see the usual folders and files but when I remove all SATA SSDs that I have and try to boot from the M.2 nothing happens. I can see it listed as connected in BIOS but I can chose it to be a bootable device.

My MB is MSI MAG X570 TOMAHAWK WIFI and the M.2 is
1TB Kingston KC3000 M.2
CPU: Ryzen 9 5960X

I would greatly appreciate any help.

 

[Lafong]

when I remove all SATA SSDs that I have and try to boot from the M.2 nothing happens.

How many drives were connected when you did the clean install?

 

[wizkid96]

How many drives were connected when you did the clean install?

Only the M.2

 

[TerryLaze]

What I can say is that in disk manager I can see that there are partitions created after installing win11 and I can see the usual folders and files but when I remove all SATA SSDs that I have and try to boot from the M.2 nothing happens. I can see it listed as connected in BIOS but I can chose it to be a bootable device.

So you have a different working windows install on the same PC?
You can run the free version of easybcd which will allow you to write an mbr (bootblock) onto the nvme and install/fix the BCD store (boot menu) on the nvme.
You could do that with the recovery environment and "dos" commands but it's pretty complicated for someone not familiar with that.
bcdstore commands

 

[wizkid96]

So you have a different working windows install on the same PC?
You can run the free version of easybcd which will allow you to write an mbr (bootblock) onto the nvme and install/fix the BCD store (boot menu) on the nvme.
You could do that with the recovery environment and "dos" commands but it's pretty complicated for someone not familiar with that.
bcdstore commands

It doesn’t hurt to try. I will do it later today and will write back to inform you guys of the results.

 

[wizkid96]

Actually it did hurt to try. I was trying to use easybcd from my SATA to write mbr onto the nvme and now the SATA boots only in automatic recovery. I did something stupid and have no idea what

 

[wizkid96]

I got win 11 installed on the M.2.
I had to install the latest version of the BIOS and use secure erase+ to format the M.2, installed win using a Flash drive and it all started working.