Addition of a 2nd m.2 nvme ssd is making the first disappear

So I upgraded my 1TB nvme to 2TB nvme some months ago. I simply pulled the 1TB and put in the 2TB, restored from my macrium backup and went off to the races never giving it another thought.

recently I decided I was going to add the other m.2 back to use as a cache since I moved all my sata drives to a supermicro jbod chassis and as such have nada connected to sata ports in the board. (presumably adding a 2nd was going to be at the cost of disabling sata 5/6 so whatever now)

i slotted in the 2nd and attempted to boot and things started asking for activation, things started asking to update, stuff was missing. it freaked. I realized after a few seconds that it had posted to the old ssd.

I simply went into the bios to change the boot order so i could log into windows and format the old one. Problem is, its nowhere to be found in the bios. the bios is instead seeing the old m.2 in the secondary m.2 slot and will only post to that one.

I enabled CSM and am able to see it then (along with my 24 disks in my jbod at that point lol) but enabling CSM does me no good so I reverted, I pulled it, and i logged in to find someone that could help me navigate this.

Both drives have the same Guid.

Boot manager cannot cope with that kind of config.

Use another computer to completely reinitialize the drive you want to use for cache before adding it back to your system.

Macboatmaster said:

your post is very hard on the eyes to read


have you intentionally changed the text colour

oh, sorry it was copy/pasted and the black background blends in as i use darkreader so my backgrounds are black anyways.

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MaloK said:

Both drives have the same Guid.

Boot manager cannot cope with that kind of config.

Use another computer to completely reinitialize the drive you want to use for cache before adding it back to your system.

ooooh, i never considered that. unfortunately I dont have another computer with an m.2 slot. is it possible to use like a usb to boot into a windows installer and format it? would that work?

Yes if you have a windows PE, delete every volumes on it, then boot back in your windows installation and create the new volume from there.

That should work.

edit:

If you have a windows install media use diskpart to run a clean command on the destination drive.

MaloK said:

Yes if you have a windows PE, delete every volumes on it, then boot back in your windows installation and create the new volume from there.

That should work.

edit:

If you have a windows install media use diskpart to run a clean command on the destination drive.

okie doke will give it a shot. i honestly should have thought of that. thanks for confirming it wasnt anything else in the meantime. I was thinking some pcie lane limitation but the fact it was visible with CSM on indicated it wasnt that.

The fact that PCI lane 2 took over 1 is somewhat

Once you have succeed, you can: on that drive, divert the maximum of disk intensive tasks...

Enable Readyboost.
create large swap file.
move temp files.
move browsers cache.
move download directory.
move programs scratch directory (ex: photoshop).
create and symlink of dirty / Write back and forth directories.
Take it for every temporary uses instead of you main drive. ex: creating large archives...
etc...

Until it dies, and there will be nothing to cry about...

LOL yea i am concerned about how quickly the tbw might pile up this way but ive never used one for cache so time will tell. I'm actually in the process of setting up drivepool for the first time and am prepping to use primocache for a L1 ram > L2 > this ssd to speed up the hodgepodge of disks (some 5900rpm smr) I have in the pool.

first foray into all of it. the pooling, the server chassis, the caching, all of it. aka some of what you said is foreign to me (for now at least)

using diskpart to clean the 1TB allowed me to once again see the 2TB which was great. Then i tried to boot lol. blue screen no matter what I did, i can only assume it was due to messing back and forth with CSM or some such when I was initially absent mindedly trying to figure it out. macrium reflects repair boot to the rescue. afforded me the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

I was able to fix it for one, and for two I was able to see that macrium can see all my hba connected disks pre windows whereas the bios cannot (without csm).

still concerned with macrium being able to see the pool pre windows (i doubt it will be able to) but thats another problem for another day and im getting off topic.

either way, thanks for the metaphorical slap upside the head. I should have assumed that was it from the get go and tried before i posted. some days we just arent all there I guess.

Excellent...

Now I'm pretty new to Macrium Reflect and have not tried it against Storage Pools... But it works on HW Raid no problems.

I would probably go with a file sync software to backup large data drives / pools.

Edit: Pretty sure booting a computer with two Drive with the same GUID is dangerous "by design"

MaloK said:

Excellent...

Now I'm pretty new to Macrium Reflect and have not tried it against Storage Pools... But it works on HW Raid no problems.

I would probably go with a file sync software to backup large data drives / pools.

Edit: Pretty sure booting a computer with two Drive with the same GUID is dangerous "by design"

Yea macrium is incredible. best money i ever spent. saved my ass so many times, allows me to experiment without concern in the registry and such, and i havent started with a fresh windows in many years nor do i intend to (ever again if i have my way).

I do intend to set up snapraid with a few parity disks for the pool. I only use macrium to make images of my system drive. I intend to save those images to the pool however (ideally). Thing is, with a software set up macrium is only going to see the virtual disk as a location from within windows. If i had something catastrophic happen and needed to restore from the rescue environment, I dont think it will see the pool as a pool, just 24 individual disks.

This makes me question how its going to handle it if at all. incrementals/differentials require the full hierarchy and drivepool balances the drives and if that stuff gets split up, in a pre OS environment i'm not sure what the result will be.

going to figure a way to test it once i get the ball rolling. should be easy enough.