[SOLVED] Modding BIOS to allow bootable NVME storage

[philm01]

Hello all,

I recently bought a NVME storage from Amazon. It is from Silicon power and it is the 1 TB series.

I installed it (with an adapter) into my ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R1 motherboard. Now, I am aware that my board does not support pcie 3.0. But, with the 2.0 speeds, I am tripling my read/write speeds from my samsung SSD so I consider this a win.

Anyways, since my board is an older board, it does not support bootable NVME storage. However, windows does recognize the NVME drive.

So, I followed this guide:
Modding bios for bootable NVME

There is one user on that forum who stated that he successfully modded the bios of the ASUS crosshair Forumla V. Which if I remember correctly came out around the same time as my board.

And I was able to mod my bios. I updated the bios, things were still working but, I noticed that my NVME storage was not appearing as a boot option.

1. So, does anyone here have experience with modding the bios for this?
2. Is there another step that I need to do that was not covered in the guide?

Technically, my nvme storage is empty. I am thinking that I might need to actually put my OS on there. I will be using the free version of the AOMEI Partition tool to migrate my OS. But, before I do that I want to make sure there is nothing else that I need to do.

3) Quick question, after the migration, I am still able to boot into my source drive if something goes wrong? I believe that this is the case but I want to check.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[USAFRet]

While with some possible custom BIOS mods, it might be possible to boot from that drive.

However...that 3x speed you refer to is not really that. That number only comes into play when moving large blocks of sequential data. Which is NOT what happens when the OS boots, or indeed a lot of standard user operations.
Booting up 4 seconds faster is absolutely not worth trying to forcefit booting from that drive.

Yes, you need the OS on it to boot from.
But a migration in this instance is NOT recommended. Even in a board that fully supports NVMe drives natively, migrating/cloning from SATA to NVMe is problematic.
A clean OS install is strongly recommended here.

Since you already have a SATA III SSD in there now, I would personally leave that as the OS drive, and install things on this new NVMe drive.
Forcing it to be the boot drive is unlikely to show you the blinding results you may be expecting.

 

[philm01]

Oh I see, well I do have an installation media for windows 10. Had an issue with a blue screen a few weeks back and had to re-install windows. Ended up losing alot of files but my important stuff was backup-ed to my external HDD.

I haven't used it very much so it is pretty fresh. Wiping Windows again and starting fresh would not be issue.

 

[USAFRet]

Oh I see, well I do have an installation media for windows 10. Had an issue with a blue screen a few weeks back and had to re-install windows. Ended up losing alot of files but my important stuff was backup-ed to my external HDD.

I haven't used it very much so it is pretty fresh. Wiping Windows again and starting fresh would not be issue.

If you're going to install on this drive, have only that drive connected while you do it.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

As said, I'd personally just have it as a secondary drive. That's what I do with my current system, and an Intel 660p.

 

[philm01]

Well, I will give it try and do a clean install on the drive and see what happens

I do have ubuntu on a secondary drive. I will make sure that when I install windows 10, on the NVME drive is installed. But afterwards, can I plug my ubuntu drive back in?

 

[USAFRet]

Well, I will give it try and do a clean install on the drive and see what happens

I do have ubuntu on a secondary drive. I will make sure that when I install windows 10, on the NVME drive is installed. But afterwards, can I plug my ubuntu drive back in?

Yes, plug it in after.

 

[philm01]

Ok so I am now typing this update after a successful windows 10 installation on my NVME memory! Had to format the SSD to work on the GPT partition style since I needed to install that OS using the UEFI boot option. All good here now.

Now installing all of the software again

 

[USAFRet]

good deal!