[SOLVED] Installed M.2 NVMe SSD and it SLOWED my boot!

[AC69]

I just installed a Crucial 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD in my PC to set as my boot drive and it seems to have SLOWED my boot time...

My system specs are as follows:

AMD Ryzen 3 2200g CPU
Gigabyte B450 Aorus M mobo
2x 8GB DDR4 G.Skill Ripjaw 3000ghz RAM
Crucial 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD
Kingston 120GB SATA SSD
Seagate 1TB HDD
EVGA gtx 970 GPU

Before I installed the M.2 SSD, I was booting off of my Kingston SSD and it booted up in a snap, no issues. It would go to the Aorus eagle icon screen for about 3 seconds and then to my login page. I added the new SSD just because. I didn't expect to boot faster, but I also didn't expect to boot slower!!

Initially, Windows wouldn't recognize the new SSD when I first plugged it in. It showed up in my BIOS, but not anywhere once I booted windows. Not in disk management, not in device manager, and not even in HWiNFO. So I powered off, unplugged the 2 old drives, and rebooted the system with just the M.2 NVMe SSD and a windows installer USB drive. I installed Windows 10 on the new drive, and it booted up. So I powered off again, plugged the other two drives back in, and booted it up. This time it recognized all the drives.

But I wanted it to boot into my original Windows specs, so I messed around with a disk cloner (Macrium Reflect), attempted to clone the Kingston SSD onto the Crucial SSD, and ran into a bunch of problems... I ended up having to reset the PC, and start from scratch 🙁

So now, I have it recognizing all 3 drives, but the bootup is different... slower! I'm experiencing the following differences:

When I boot, it starts with the same Aorus eagle icon screen, but then goes to a black screen with a cursor that toggles from the very top left corner of the screen to about 2 inches closer to the center... does this for about 10 seconds.
It then goes to a blue screen with the Windows icon, the little loading spiral moves for another 10 seconds or so, and then it goes to my login screen.
My disks also have a few weird differences. In the BIOS, I used to have two options for boot priorities with the drives I had Windows installed on. One was just the drive name, but another had "(Windows Boot Manager)" in parentheses in front of the drive name. Now I don't have the (Windows Boot Manager) boot priority options showing up in my BIOS.
Finally, my partitions seem a little off. My Windows boot drives used to have 3 partitions, a recovery, the Windows one, and another I can't remember the name of. Now my boot drive only has 1 partition, the Windows one...

I'm worried I might have caused some lasting damage here, but I'm still holding out hope that someone in these forums knows what's going on. Anyone have an idea what's going on??

 

[mdd1963]

You can get in a mess when unneeded drives are attached during install...and going from SATA to NVME compicates things, preventing a simple clone and reboot....

I'd fresh install with ONLY the NVME drive installed/attached...(disconnect SATA from remaining 2 drives, absolutely preventing their involvement/interference

Then nuke/quick format the other 2 drives, starting over,installing assorted apps where you desire.....

 

[AC69]

You can get in a mess when unneeded drives are attached during install...and going from SATA to NVME compicates things, preventing a simple clone and reboot....

I'd fresh install with ONLY the NVME drive installed/attached...(disconnect SATA from remaining 2 drives, absolutely preventing their involvement/interference

Then nuke/quick format the other 2 drives, starting over,installing assorted apps where you desire.....

So that's what what I ended up doing to arrive here... BUT I think I found my fix.

After messing around all night, I noticed it wouldn't boot into windows if I ONLY enabled the NVMe SSD to boot. I had to have the HDD (ugh!) enabled in the boot sequence in order for it to work, so I came to the conclusion there was something on the HDD that I needed on my new SSD.

So back to the partitions... the HDD had the "System Reserved" partition, but the other two drives didn't. I'm not sure why not, every other time I used the windows installation USB to put a fresh piece of Windows on a drive, I always ended up with 3 partitions, but this wasn't the case. So I did my research and found that the System Reserved partition has important boot data. I resolved that I needed the System Reserved partition on the SSD.

With the help of a free partitioning tool, I shrunk the 1 partition on my SSD down to make room for the system reserved partition, and moved the system reserved partition onto my boot drive. It worked

My boot screens still aren't as clean as they were before, but they're MUCH faster. Boot speeds are back to normal. I've shifted my focus onto making my boot screens look prettier, i.e. go back to the one Aorus logo loading screen immediately before the Windows login screen without the other mess in between.