Having trouble booting from new SSD - Asrock 970, Samsung 970

[hillbillypharmacist]

Hello!
I’ve picked up a Samsung 970 EVO as an upgrade to my rig. I’ve got the Asrock 970a g3.1 motherboard. I installed it into the M.2 slot under the video card, no problem.

But I can’t get the damn thing to boot from the SSD. Works fine if I boot from the old disk. Tried both moving system with EaseUs software, and a clean install from USB with old drive disconnected.

Tried all kinds of BIOS settings, everything I could google that looked halfway promising. Couldn’t get anything more than ‘please select proper boot device’ on the clean install.

Will that motherboard boot from NVME SSD? Is it something simple I’m missing?

 

[Tanyac]

That board may not support NVMe drives as boot drives, the manual mentions nothing about NVMe. There is only one BIOS version for it (1.20), so it's not like you can add support for it.

However, if you want to try you will need to install the Samsung NVMe drivers onto the old drive with the M.2 SSD installed, then clone the OS to the new SSD with something like Macrium, EaseUS or Acronis.

I don't recall if the Samsung Data Migration software requires that the source drive be a Samsung drive, but if it doesn't then you could give that a try also instead of the above programs.

Samsung NVMe Drivers: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/

 

[hillbillypharmacist]

Thank you Tanyac. I feared that was the case. I bought under the assumption that if it had an M.2 slot, it’d boot from it. But you know how that goes.

 

[Tanyac]

It might boot SATA drives, like the Samsung 860 EVO
You could try asking on the ASRock forums, or submit a ticket at ASRock. Note though that ASRock are horrendously slow at responding.