zbook - Maybe I'm wrong, but #1, none of my NVMe drives are Intel. #2, they are not PCI-E drives which is what that Intel document addresses. They are M.2 drives. I'm not finished reading the doc but it's bedtime at 3:30am. My initial though is that the document doesn't apply to my scenario.
Okay.
Tomorrow test booting UEFI without CSM and report your findings.
zbook - Do you agree that since I already have two NVMe drives running in my PC, both of them have Windows 10 on them and boot without issues, that I don't need to follow the instructions in that Intel document? The only differences I can see about the new NVMe drive is that it's 2TB and the other ones are 500GB and the new one I currently have running in a USB port (so that I could clone the Windows OS with apps to it) as opposed to an internal M.2 port. I don't know if either of these differences would explain why I cannot boot from the new NVMe drive.
There are only 2 M.2 ports in my desktop PC so to test if the USB port is the issue I'd have to remove the oldest M.2 drive and replace it with this newest drive. Might be worth trying. Your thoughts?
A NVMe M.2 drive is a PCIe drive as M.2 uses the PCIe lanes.
I can see 3 possible ways to make your NVMe drive boot able:
- Detach ALL other drives (SATA or power cable) from the MB. (Important to avoid having Windows on one drive and the boot loader on another drive).
- A clean install, booting the Win 10 installation drive as UEFI and deleting all partitions on the NVMe drive before proceeding.
- A clean install and then replacing the C: partition with the one on the legacy drive as explained by Bree on post #12
- Clone the Legacy-MBR drive into the NVMe, boot from a Win 10 installation drive and convert to UEFI-GPT using mbr2gpt.exe
There is also other options based on one of the above.
mHz - Thanks for the feedback. I like your last option. I almost tried it that way except I was apprehensive about converting the MBR to GPT. But now that the new NVMe drive is pretty much an experiment, there's no reason not to try it.
Once you clone the current Legacy-MBR to the new NVMe drive, install it on the main M.2 slot.
- Again, detach ALL other drives (SATA or power cable) from the MB. (Important to avoid having Windows on one drive and the boot loader on another drive).
- Boot from a Win 10 installation drive and on the first screen launch a CMD window (Shift+F12)
Type mbr2gpt /validate
If ok, type:
mbr2gpt /convert
Enter BIOS and set to boot as UEFI-GPT
mHz - The only reason I don't detach any other boot drives with Windows is that I need to have access to all data on those drives in case I need to transfer data or anything else to get apps to work appropriately on the new drive. While I understand that you make the request to prove that the new drive can be booted successfully, I cannot commit to maintaining my desktop PC that way. I do need access to previous Windows installations. I understand what you're saying that a boot partition on a different drive may interfere with the booting of the new drive.
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AddRAM - I assume the new drive was an MBR drive and it booted as an MBR drive? Did you convert to GPT after the cloning? Anything else you had to do to make it work?
You detach / take out the other drives during the conversion so it doesn't convert the wrong drive.
After it boots successfully as UEFI-GPT you can attach the drives back
Yes.so to test if the USB port is the issue I'd have to remove the oldest M.2 drive and replace it with this newest drive. Might be worth trying.
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