M.2 NVMe shows in BIOS and Windows but not in boot selection

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firebirdude

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Aug 16, 2004
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ASRock Extreme6ac motherboard (newest BIOS)
Samsung 970Pro NVMe drive (new)
Samsung 860Evo drive (old OS drive)

I used the Samsung migration tool to clone my OS drive onto the new 970Pro. Everything went smoothly. BIOS recognizes the 970Pro under the NVMe storage menu. But when I try to adjust boot order, the NVMe drive is not on the list. HOWEVER if I just use the F11 quick-select boot menu during POST (versus entering into BIOS), the NVMe drive is shown and boots perfectly once selected. No matter which drive I use to boot into Windows, Windows can always see all the drives. I just can't set the new NVMe drive to boot by default.

I did search. Only answers I could find involved reinstalling Windows from scratch. I can't find my Windows Key. And I know I've also used this Key to activate several times (rebuilding/upgrading). I've called into Microsoft several times and had them give me a code to activate my copy again and again. And I had to argue with them about it last time (even that was like 3 years ago). There's no way I could use this Key to activate again, even if I could find it. Point being, I just need the clone to work.
 

firebirdude

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I got it. One of the 8 billion menus in my BIOS is "Hard Drive BBS Priorities". In there, the NVMe drive shows up and you can select what SSD has boot priority. Once the NVMe drive was selected, it was then available on the normal boot order menu, however, now the old Samsung 850 was missing. Who cares though. I rebooted and the Samsung 850 is still being recognized in Windows. It allowed a format on it and that's all she wrote.

But keep in mind this particular motherboard uses what's called an "Ultra M.2" slot. It has 4 lanes on the PCI-E bus dedicated for it. So it's not sharing SATA ports or anything like that. It's not a "one or the other" with this motherboard. So not sure why it's forcing one or the other in the boot sequence.
 
Apr 20, 2022
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I got it. One of the 8 billion menus in my BIOS is "Hard Drive BBS Priorities". In there, the NVMe drive shows up and you can select what SSD has boot priority. Once the NVMe drive was selected, it was then available on the normal boot order menu, however, now the old Samsung 850 was missing. Who cares though. I rebooted and the Samsung 850 is still being recognized in Windows. It allowed a format on it and that's all she wrote.

But keep in mind this particular motherboard uses what's called an "Ultra M.2" slot. It has 4 lanes on the PCI-E bus dedicated for it. So it's not sharing SATA ports or anything like that. It's not a "one or the other" with this motherboard. So not sure why it's forcing one or the other in the boot sequence.
I know this thread is 4 years old, but I could kiss you right now. I just installed my 5800x3d on my asus x370 prime pro and I could not get the m.2 drive to show up, even though It would show up if I booted up a windows 10 bootup USB. I just followed your advice on "hard drive BBS priorities" and BAM it showed up right there. God it was driving me nuts. Thanks again.
 
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