Question How to use WD SN500 as boot device on Asus ROG Maximus IX Hero

[Howard_Woodard]

I have two Maximus IX Hero mobos that were configured with the same hardware - I7-7700K cpu, BIOS 1301, 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-3000 RAM and Seagate HDDs. They both booted and ran fine. Recently I got a good price on the new Intel SSDPEKNW020T8 NVMe PCI-e SSD. I plugged it in, used Casper 10 to make a bootable clone, told BIOS to boot from the new drive and wa la -- worked perfectly and runs like a bandit.

A couple weeks later Amazon had some really good pricing on the new WD Blue SN500 NVMe SSD and I bought one. Using the first PC's "twin" I then went through the same installation steps. While each step completes without error I have not been able to boot from it.

I can access it fine. Casper makes what appears to be a perfect clone and I can easily move files to/from it. It just won't function as a boot device. I get the blue screen abend with the "inaccessible boot device" error.

It looks to me like the BIOS for each machine is configured the same but there are so many parameters, many of them nested, that I wouldn't bet that they are all exactly the same.

Does anyone have any help for this?

Thanks in advance for whatever help you can offer.

Howard
Redmond, WA

 

[USAFRet]

Going from a non-NVMe drive to an NVMe drive, read this:

Cloned to an NVMe M2 SSD and won't boot forum.macrium.com

 

[Howard_Woodard]

Thanks. I'm unfamiliar with Macrium but it appears the poster solved his problem by installing a Samsung NVMe driver. I've looked but not found a WD driver for NVMe.

Did I miss something?

 

[USAFRet]

Macrium Reflect is a tool similar to Casper. In fact, I much prefer it over Casper.

Possible driver found here:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/products/product-detail/p/1457#WD_downloads
The WD SSD Dashboard.

 

[Howard_Woodard]

Hi again and I really appreciate your help with this.

I installed the WD SSD Dashboard when I installed the drive. There are no drivers listed in the downloads section. The other FAQs also made no mention of a special driver.

This caused me to look at the first PC again and it did install an Intel NVMe driver for the Intel NVMe device.

 

[USAFRet]

Possibly try a clone from the Intel NVMe to the WD NVMe.

 

[Howard_Woodard]

Thanks. I'll give that a shot and post back.

 

[Howard_Woodard]

I tried 3 different cloning packages - no change.
I reinstalled Win 10 Pro - no change
I converted MBR disk to GPT - no change
Finally, out of frustration, I changed several BIOS settings and one or more of them apparently fixed the problem. The changes were in the CSM (Compatibility Support Module).

I appreciate your attempt to help me. I'm gonna leave this a [working] mystery for now.

Howard