Update3 - Win10 installed. I have finished initial setup and rebooted the system twice. 30 seconds from power on to desktop, not bad for a 10 year old mobo/cpu/ram.
Not sure what caused all the craziness, we'll see if the system remains stable as I add other drives, and software.
Thanks to all who helped.
Put the Win 10 USB installation drive on a USB port (black one on the rear)
Detach any other drives (SATA or Power cable) from the MB.
During POST, press F12 to launch the boot menu. You may see two options for the USB drive. USB UEFI (Name) and USB (Name).
I think the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3 has no UEFI BIOS so select USB (name) to install as Legacy-MBR or USB UEFI (Name) if your MB has UEFI BIOS and if you want to install as UEFI-GPT.
Go to install and delete ALL partitions on the main drive till you have one and only one unallocated space and then proceed.
If you don't want to use MS account, don't enable updates or connect to the internet during installation.
Your motherboard has sata 2 3gb/s and sata 3 6gb/s, and in addition it has 2 sata controllers.
You must connect the ssd to a sata 3 6gb/s port. Starting from the top, the first 2 sata ports are sata 3 but another controller (the second) than the other ports. The other 2 ports below the first 2 ports are sata 3 and on the intel controller.
You can therefore connect, to use the full speed of the ssd, the sdd on the first 4 ports starting from the top. And you are right to choose ahci instead of ide and raid.
@Megahertz one more question... then I will :)
I just (really just) realized that gigabyte has a(n old) "beta" bios to flash this mobo to UEFI capability. If I'm going to try this now's the time, since I haven't installed anything yet, a reset would be easy.
How worth it is it to switch to UEFI vs. the legacy BIOS? The main thing I can find is enabling Win11 upgrade at some point. Should I leave well enough alone, or is it worth it to try this "beta" BIOS (released in 2013, LOL) no stable release of it yet.
I got nvme boot working on an lga1155 mobo with a 3rd gen cpu.
booting nvme disk via pcie adapter on older machines - Windows 7 Forums
If you check win raid they might already be a bios with nvme support for your mobo,
Offers: Already modded special BIOSes - Win-Raid Forum
or you can do it yourself
Request: NVME Support for Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 - BIOS Modding Requests - Win-Raid Forum
I am currently running Gigabytes U1j beta BIOS for UEFI support. BIOS ID 8A11AG0B, its dated 03/06/2013...
Thank you!!! Modded BIOS in like a minute and the cloned OS I already had on the NVME drive booted on the very first try!
Last edited by SIW2; 22 Dec 2022 at 19:57.
I've decided to leave well enough alone for now, and stick with the Award BIOS rather than flash to the UEFI. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it if I ever want to upgrade this PC to win11, which I think is doubtful. :P
@Kieran28, I have a GA-Z68A-D3-B3 with a i7 2600k on it (that is with my wife) and once I did a BIOS "upgrade" to a UEFI beta BIOS.
The big problem with the UEFI beta BIOS was that the fan control wasn't working properly, so I decided to install the latest non beta BIOS.
The UEFI beta BIOS also had a problem. Once installed you couldn't move back to a previous BIOS. I did found a way to revert but I don't recommend you to install the UEFI beta BIOS.
Install the latest non UEFI beta BIOS (If you don't have it), but don't install the UEFI beta BIOS.
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