Trouble Booting From Samsung EVO 960 M.2 Drive

[jimlau]

I installed W10 on the above drive. When I try to boot from it, it doesn't work. It says insert boot media. I had already installed W10 on the drive. And I can see the drive in BIOS and windows explorer when booting from another drive.

Oddly, when I boot from an SSD drive also connected, that works, but it asks if I want to use W10 on Volume 4 or 7. When I choose 4, the Samsung M.2 drive does indeed boot.

Anyone know what is going on? Obviously I want to boot from the M.2 without needing another boot drive.

Thanks.

CPU - i7 6700K
Board - Z170A M3 Gaming
RAM - G.SKILL TridentZ Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM
OS - Windows 10 Pro
GPU - none
Sound Card - None

 

[Saltgrass]

You did not give the Manufacturer of your board but most Desktop boards with M.2 slots have the driver for the Boot device in the UEFI Bios. If you are using a x64 bit version of Windows you installed correctly, it should boot when it sees the Windows Boot Manager as the boot device.

Some boards have limitations of using certain PCIe slots and the M.2 slot.

Some laptops have their M.2 slot set up to use either SATA or PCIe. On those systems, how the SATA controller is configured determines how the M.2 slot behaves. Maybe some desktops are also doing that but I need to board Manufacturer to check.

 

[jimlau]

You did not give the Manufacturer of your board but most Desktop boards with M.2 slots have the driver for the Boot device in the UEFI Bios. If you are using a x64 bit version of Windows you installed correctly, it should boot when it sees the Windows Boot Manager as the boot device.

Some boards have limitations of using certain PCIe slots and the M.2 slot.

Some laptops have their M.2 slot set up to use either SATA or PCIe. On those systems, how the SATA controller is configured determines how the M.2 slot behaves. Maybe some desktops are also doing that but I need to board Manufacturer to check.

It's MSI.

My SSD in boot options is listed twice - once with boot manager device next to it, 1 without. If I try to boot the SSD without Boot Manager listed beside it, it does not boot. When I choose the 1 listed as Boot Manager, it does boot.

So, as for the M.2, it is listed without the term Boot Manager next to it. It just lists it as the Samsung drive. Is that a sign something is not set right for the Samsung?

 

[Saltgrass]

The board appears to state the M.2 slot is PCIe only.

Different Bioses may present boot devices with different titles. But the ones I am familiar with will say Windows Boot Manager. You may see the drive listed as UEFI but that is not normally the boot device.

You may want to remove the other drive to avoid confusion. I have seen, more than once, which boot files were placed on the wrong drive.

How did you install Win 10 and where did the Boot media come from.

I will try to get you a picture of my system, which is not exactly like yours but does have a Samsung M.2 PCIe drive.

 

[Saltgrass]

Here is the picture. The Samsung drive is first followed by a 2.5 inch Win 7 install. The USB drive is a bootable recovery drive.

 

[Tim Locke]

Interesting. I am planning my next PC to have a 1TB NVME M2w format drive. So I will note what happens here.

 

[Wolfie]

It also depends on where you put the "bootloader" when installing W10, if you didn't put in the MBR (Master Boot record) of the first partition, it won't find W10 or any other OS, if you are using both an SSD and HDD, which of those contains the MBR?.

As an example:

 

[Clintlgm]

With UEFI it is best to Install windows with only the Drive/SSD your putting the OS on. Some how with multi drives connected sometimes the Boot Manager will get on a different drive than the OS is on. Which seems to be the problem you are experiencing.
Boot manager can be edited to point to your SSD, and boot manager should be the default boot item.
If the boot manger is on a different drive you will still be dependent on 2 drives to boot. I believe you can remove or disconnect all other drives and do a windows reset to rebuild a boot manager on the OS SSD