How to use new NVMe SSD as new Windows boot drive, if UEFI can not see the drive, but existing Windows 10 installation recognizes it?

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I gave it up, so the new Windows 10 is on my SATA 3 SSD, and the NVMe disk is a pure data disk.

However I have an interesting experience, which adds something the diagnostics. When I installed the Win 10 to the normal SATA 3 SSD, the BIOS also did not boot after the install required the restart, the freshly installed SATA SSD was no bootable. So I plugged out the NVMe, retried the Win 10 install, and saw, that Win 10 in the previous unsuccessful attempt created a "new style" (forgive my journeyman terminology) 100Mb boot partition on the SATA 3, which was not recognizable for my BIOS (I suppose). I've deleted all partitions again in this 2nd setup attempt, and now it created an 50MB System partition, which worked fine for my BIOS. So I suppose the "new style" partition which probably prevent my BIOS to boot. Bonus: Why Win 10 setup creates "new style" boot partition even a SATA 3 disk just because it sees an other NVMe disk in the system?

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I have an existing Windows 10 installation, which boots from a SATA SSD; recently I installed a new NVMe SSD to my motherboard using a PCIe adapter card in my motherboard's [ASUSTEK P8H77-V LE] 3rd gen 16x PCIe slot.

• When I start my existing Windows 10 from the older SATA SSD, Windows 10 sees the new NVMe SSD and it works with real NVMe speed [tested], so the hardware, the adapter card, and the new drive are working as expected

I tried to install Win 10, created with the official MS tool, to my new NVMe PCI adapter hosted drive, but after Win 10 setup's first phase reboots, UEFI stiil does not recognize it and the only boot option is the UEFI USB install drive (tried F8 boot menu and UEFI boot menu):

• UEFI has been updated to the latest version [v1307 from 2014]
• In BIOS in CSM setting enabled PCI Express boot, and set it UEFI.
• Removed all other (SATA) SSD to make sure Win 10 setup will see only the new NVMe drive, and all partitions will created/updated there, not on other drives.
• Win 10 setup sees the unformatted unpartitioned new NVMe PCI adapter hosted drive correctly, and installs Win 10, then asks for reboot.
• When rebooting, the only bootable device BIOS see, is still just the UEFI pen drive.
• If I remove the USB drive, I get UEFI error:

  UEFI settings do not fully support the boot device, press F1 and go to CSM settings and adjust them

  I tried to completely disable CSM, but it's not possible since my display adapter does not support UEFI, so I receive a UEFI error in this case, so CSM setting enabled PCI Express boot and set to UEFI
  • Why does the UEFI firmware have a PCIe boot option that I can set to UEFI, if it seems to not be supported?
• If I retry Windows setup, I see that the previous installation attempt correctly partitioned and formatted the drive and that setup also recognizes it as a previous Windows install; two partitions reside in the new NVMe drive, an EFI and OS partition, with the latter housing the OS folder hierarchy

Am I trying to do something impossible, or just doing something wrong?

1 Answer

Firstly, you didn't mention your NVMe partition style (GPT Or MBR).

Any disk that isn't initialized using a GPT scheme might not be visible in UEFI boot menu.

I assume that you didn't make any changes on that disk, and here are the right steps to initialize a new disk (SSD or NVMe or whatever):

1- Use a bootable partitioning software to initialize the disk into the GPT partition scheme, and if not available, you can use diskpart tool from Microsoft - if you're familiar with it - by pressing Shift + F10 from Windows setup to open the command prompt and type diskpart, but you should be really careful using that thing!

2- Start or resume Windows setup and you should see the NVMe as unpartitioned or Unallocated.

3- Choose that disk and click Next (don't format it or even create a partition because UEFI will handle that).

4- Continue with your setup.