Question M.2 SSD is no longer recognized by laptop ?

[dengebre]

I have a MSI GE75 Raider with a 1TB SATA Drive (boot drive) and a 1TB PCIe 3.0x4 M.2 (2280) SSD.
It worked great until my son used the laptop for a college project where he re-partitioned the drives incorrectly. The laptop was rendered useless so I scrubbed/reformatted the boot drive and reinstalled Windows 10. It works now but ever since then it runs much slower.
Question #1: Is there anything I may have missed that is causing the slowdown?

During my resurrection of the laptop, I noticed in the BIOS that only the SATA drive is recognized. It says the M.2 SSD slot is empty. I checked to make sure that the SSD is seated properly, and the laptop does not have a lot of hours on it so I wouldn’t think the drive would have died yet.
Question #2: Any thoughts on why the SSD is not recognized?

Thank you in advance for your help and expertise.

 

[boohoo2u]

You really should be using the PCIe SSD as the boot drive instead of the SATA HDD, as it will be much quicker.

Try taking out the SATA HDD and then try installing Windows 10 on the PCIe SSD.

 

[dengebre]

Agreed. That's what I was attempting to do when I went into the BIOS to change the boot order. That is when I noticed that the PCIe SSD slot was "empty". Has the drive failed or is there possibly a different issue?

 

[Bob.B]

Agreed. That's what I was attempting to do when I went into the BIOS to change the boot order. That is when I noticed that the PCIe SSD slot was "empty". Has the drive failed or is there possibly a different issue?

Does the ssd work if you connect it to a different pc?

 

[boohoo2u]

Question is what else could your son have changed in the bios?

First of all I would check if a newer bios is available for the laptop.
Remove other HDD from laptop so you don't get confused which is which.
In the bios, is your boot mode selected as LEGACY or UEFI?
Is the PCIe SSD formatted as GPT or MBR?

If UEFI then format as GPT, sometimes using MBR it might not be recognised.