No Boot, Drives Not detected, Can't Load Win10 Pleses Help!  

MaggieDale said:

Thank you, I was looking at Mother board manual!
This board only has 4 SATA ports, so I assume in my case this information would apply to ports 3&4?
Thing is, I have a 500GB storage SSD plugged into Port 4 now and it works flawlessly?
The initial set up had the storage in port 1 or 2 and that seemed to work okay too??
Still confused, but more great information!
Thanks for your time!!

(snip)

If your board is an MSI B45 Gaming Plus, this is its layout (from the manual):



6 SATA ports, but two of them (1 and 2) are in a vertical orientation. An actual image of the board is consistent with this. Is the B450 Gaming Plus your board, or is it something else?

If you're using an M.2 drive, do not use SATA ports 5 or 6. You still have 4 ports available.

MaggieDale said:

- - - Updated - - -

My board is a B450M Gaming Plus.
Only 4 SATA Ports, all functional with M.2 populated.

Aha. In your first post, you wrote B450 Gaming Plus. It's a full-sized ATX board.

The B450M Gaming Plus is different, and it's MicroATX.



No worries about an M.2 drive deactivating SATA ports 5 and 6, because they don't exist. No concerns about what you get when you plug a card into the second PCI-E X16 slot, because there isn't one.

Using an adapter (riser) to use a second M.2 drive should be OK, although it would have to go in a PCI-E X1 slot. Current M.2 drives use PCI-E X4 (four lanes), so X1 may limit the performance. (PCI-E 3.0-X1 has a theoretical bandwidth of nearly 1GB/s, according to Wikipedia. X4, four times that. A good PCI-E 3.0 M.2 drive can exceed 3GB/s sequential reads.)

Whatever the issue with the drives is, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with competition for PCI-E lanes (which is why SATA 5 & 6 are disabled on the B450 - not -M when an M.2 drive is used).

That doesn't solve your problem, but it points out that it isn't expected for your mother board. You should be able to use an M.2 drive, 4 SATA drives, and both PCI-E X1 slots at the same time. What you're seeing is not normal.

I hope that you can spot the problem.

Hi folks

@MaggieDale

some of these boards when you populate the pci-e x1 slots with the sata connectors - the computer BIOS will still only recognise (at boot time) the ports populated FIRST on the pci_e-x1 slot and then the others up to the original 4 or 5. --All disks will be recognised AFTER the OS is booted.

SO if you have 4 ports populated on the pci_e x1 card as well as the ones on the main mobo the computer will look for the boot device ONLY on the extension card. It's a silly quirk but some mobos really operate like that instead of allowing the BIOS to see all the ports at boot time.

SO for booting from the MOBO only have 3 at the most ports on the extension card populated.

I think in this case if you need 2 ports for your device to boot from the MOBO then only populate 2 on the pci_e card.

You could move the boot device over to the extension card -- even for gaming (which isn't really that I/O intensive these days - most of the real work is done in the graphics GPU) a 3Gb/s connection on the pci_e 1x card will be more than good enough.

Note again AFTER the OS has booted all disks will be acessible !!!.

Cheers
jimbo

Your absolutely right bobkn I did originally list my board wrong!
That was a stupid mistake! Sorry if I wasted anyone's time with that!

Although, its clear now why my SSD storage drive will work no matter the location.
The board manual makes no mention that I could find concerning the fact of those ports remain in service after a M.2 installation! So that was valuable information for sure.

I'm now wondering if what Jimbo45 is saying about the pci_e x1 slot is correct, this could have caused the original problem?
However, this problem of "not finding a drive to boot from" did not happen when I first installed the Samsung into the PCIe slot using a RIITOP NVME Adapter.
But when I first installed this set up (Samsung with NVME adaptor) the Samsung drive had Win10 installed.
So, maybe it recognized the OS on the Samsung installed in the PCI_e and booted.
Then once I wiped the Samsung (To use as storage) and shut the machine off, when, upon re-booting, it checked the PCI_e location and wasn't able to find an OS?
This would make sense, but I'm still lost as to why the bios would sometimes show the main Sabrent M.2 drive, then other times would not?

Anyway it's up and running now on the new Sabrent drive with all original data intact, so I will start reintroducing (one at a time)
1. The aftermarket heat sink for the boot M.2 Sabrent drive.
2. Then, the empty Samsung NVME M.2 and RIITOP NVME Adapter into the PCI_e slot.

If what Jimbo45 is saying is in fact the case, I should get a warning screen "Choose a bootable drive"
If that is the case, I should be able to then just remove the expansion card with the Samsung and the machine will find the Sabrent M.2 and boot normally. Does this sound correct?
If that turns out to be the case, I guess utilizing the PCI_e slot as storage is no longer an option?

Thanks for all your help!