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G_Day_Mate

23 Posts

7910

July 16th, 2020 18:00

New Samsung PCIe NVME SSD ... BIOS(UEFI) editor does not present it as a Boot Option ... Nuts!

G'Day,

This Inspiron 5675 is booted off an SATA, 256GB SSD in a M.2 slot on the mother board. Its all original and good except that it has become nearly full. To augment it I purchased a Samsung  970 EVO Plus 1T from Dell and installed into the second M.2 slot which is PCIe capable. Upon startup it was identified in the BIOS MAIN page as a M.2 PCIe SSD and I've been able to use windows to partition the drive and clone an image from the original C: SSD to this new 1T unit.  Great so far!    All that remains is to designate it as the boot drive.  Alas, No Joy! 

Following numerous Dell tech notes and youtube videos, I've made many attempts to use the BIOS editor to point to this as the boot drive...all to no avail.  Did I mention numerous attempts?    There has been good coaching regarding: Boot List Option set to UEFI, Secure Boot to Disabled, SATA type to AHCI, etc.  

Nutshell: The drive works well...It now has an image of the original OS drive (C:)...The BIOS sees it as a PCIe SSD, but I cannot seem to figure out how to Add a Boot Option effectively.  The BIOS editor seems to lack many of the features of more modern BIOS editors.   Can someone please point me to a definitive instruction set to complete this, hopefully, great upgrade.

Are there utilities other that the BIOS editor that can alter the boot drive designation?  Or a third party BIOS editor? 

Thanks, I know your busy but I could really use the advice. 

(Oh, you will appropriately ask so I'll offer this. Prior to the new SSD addition I used Dell sources to update all drivers and the BIOS. The Dell representative took the time to verify compatibility and called me back. (Kudos!!!)  Similarly the Windows OS was carefully, and fully, updated.  All the system disks were backed up and a restore point created.  A recovery flash disk was also created using Windows utilities.  I'm pretty confident in the preparation.  Just stuck on the designation as a boot drive.)

G_Day_Mate

23 Posts

July 17th, 2020 08:00

Good Day,

Many thanks to SpeedStep for the contribution of good Samsung resources above and anyone else who took the time to consider this issue.   The good news is that the installation is now fully functional and I believe that the error was an incomplete image of the C: drive.

After installing the new Samsung 1T SSD, Windows Disk Manager was used to format and partition.  This was successful in that Windows saw the drive as fully available. It could be seen with both File Explorer and Device Manager and performance tests were successful. 

Next, to create what I believe was an incomplete image of the original C: SSD (256GB) "Windows Control Panel" offers "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)".  On the left side is "Create System Image".  Well that was all too inviting and perhaps the Windows 7 note should have been taken more seriously.   The image was completed but I believe that there was important content needed for a Windows 10 boot disk that was lacking. (I'm guessing here and I should be cautious in my statement.  Perhaps others can comment on the viability of this tool.)  The blogosphere presents discussions of similar difficulties with using this utility for other W10 efforts.

Not to plug Acronis but I'd been using this tool set for backup and it had a 'Clone Disk' utility which again successfully reformatted the new 1T SSD and imaged the contents from the original C:OS disk.  I did have to tweak this with Disk Manager to add a label but upon reboot the BIOS again saw the new disk as functional.  Now my memory is thin here from the thick of the battle, but there still was not an apparent entry in the Boot List.  

Here again a good soul had made entries in this community suggesting that the original C: SSD needed to be removed to force the system into another realm.  (I' had attempted this with the first image as well.)  With the old SSD removed the restart was not successful and the system began "checking media" which seemed to end in failure and offered only "Shutdown".  Upon restart I again entered the BIOS and I was able to find an entry in the UEFI Boot list "HDD1 - Windows Boot Manager (Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB)".

Eureka....exiting the BIOS the system returned to a natural Windows 10 environment and all functionality is as expected.  

OK, clearly I'm no expert and to jeopardize your system based on my advice would be foolhardy.  If other experts had insight that could plug the holes that would be ideal for other troubled readers. 

The important detail here is that this Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 SSD is compatible with the Inspiron 5675 and that it not only increases the boot capacity from 256GB to 1TB but it also presented a three fold increase benchmark performance.  

Again, many thanks to the combined knowledge and generosity of the community.  

speedstep

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July 17th, 2020 01:00

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