M2 Boot on Legacy Bios Motherboard

tbh I do not know the answer for legacy mobos, but I do remember having to be extra careful in my mobo settings on an ASUS Strix board. I assume you checked page 16 of your Gigabyte manual as that seems to be just as picky.

However, I probably made my own life hard in that at the time it was much cheaper to buy two half-size M2’s rather than one full size, so I set up my Windows boot drive to use storage spaces, and pfaffed around using a bootable usb stick to get Windows installed. I’m sorry but I now cannot remember the details other than it being a bit of a PITA.

with an old mobo like that and w8,1.

I would have thought that uefi would even come into it.

have a look in the bios and see if you have uefi enabled if so for another option from the drop down?

Thats really confusing that the m2 is not bootable. I have not come across that before.

There’s an Intel SSD PCIe NVMe Boot Installation Guide here. Basically it has to be UEFI and the Mobo OEM has to have implemented the requisite features, none of which will be on by default. There will be much tinkering with CSM settings, which always caused me grief. I’ve given up using new hardware on old hardware that wasn’t really designed for it.

You may be right John, I forget as it’s ages since I cloned a SATA drive to an NVMe. In fact it’s increasingly rare I touch SATA drives in PCs or Laptops these days.

Ed, I believe it’s down to chipset and motherboard support as well as drivers (which are especially important for installation media). I seriously doubt the M2 pcie drive would be seen at all.

In a reverse scenario, I have put an M2 WD Green SATA into the second slot of my Thinkbook, It’s not detected at all. Turns out the M2 slots are NVMe only. I suspect that the only way I could boot from a SATA device of any format is via USB adapter, but I’ve not tested that. I do know a Thinkbook will boot from a USB thumb drive though. Would it boot with a Thunderbolt device? Not a clue.

You may be right, but I suspect it’ll be a leap too far.

I think your ‘cloning’ step may be the problem.  Installing from a USB drive accomplishes two things, it puts the necessary boot sectors on the M2 and identifies the M2 as the boot device.

i grant that is an issue.  However, according to this article the real kicker is that the mobo must be UEFI compatible to use as a boot device.

The issue seems to be getting it to be the boot device and AFAIK that’s a BIOS issue. I have seen the boot from 1 drive and run from another before on a PC I worked on. That may be a possibility. Or how about spending the money on a motherboard (& CPU) that can actually do it natively?