Thanks a whole bunch. I was really really struggling getting Clover working (Been to several sites & tutorials, changed boot files and hell knows what else I’ve tried!) and it didn’t work with the NVMe driver at all, so I was ready to call the quits with that.
Then I found this article and it really saved my bacon. I have yet to try this on my SuperMicro server which has some +30 disks, so it might be somewhat of an challenge to get it detecting the right disk and set it to boot with the NVMe as the default one.
But, I got this far and it managed to boot in UEFI-mode, and that motherboard has some UEFI-support, so I don’t expect there to be any problems, or at least not that many, in that department.
At the very least, I’m now able to run that on my other PC which also lacks native M.2 support. Best case scenario, I get both computers running with it, worst case only one, until I get the other one working as this looks promising AF.
Thanks for making a simple tutorial which actually works right off the bat, apart from me not having set up the UEFI-boot in BIOS, which was fixed within a couple of seconds.
Edit:
I was unable to use that bootloader, so I was incredibly lucky with the “regular” Clover, but I will still use this on my other computer. Just waiting to finish backing up all data so that I can erase the other SSD and install Windows on it and there will be no more slow SATA SSDs for the OS.
Two things that I noticed with regular Clover; One was that the boot6 (Which seem to be started or is(?) the file “boot”) had to be removed/backed up and replaced with a copy of boot7 (renamed to boot), and secondly, as I was pulling all cards, including the GPU and thought that the internal crappy Matrox-something-16 MB VRAM would suffice, I was very mistaken.
I got a strange thing when first trying to boot it up, since SuperMicro have their own way of making BIOSes; Normally, there’s a lot of beeps when things like USB devices are activated (Typically a lot of them when using hubs, one beep/device), and as I saw “6” then a seemingly frozen blank screen, I heard the same beeping noises, only a few more, but then nothing happened.
When I then suspected, after a revelation that it juuust might be the internal GPU, it turned out to be just that. I was ecstatic. I just got it to work.
I was able to finally boot up Windows from the SSD (I used the one I previously installed on from the other machine).
Then I spent maybe half an hour trying to get the machine to play ball with the ASMedia 1166 SATA-controller that just wouldn’t allow me to disable it.
Normally, the BIOS reads the addon-ROMs then present found drives in the BIOS settings, which it surely did, but it totally ignored all other drives being disabled.
Luckily I found out that I could disable the PCIe slots, which solved the problem.
I also had to cycle between using the NVMe SSD/USB-stick with the regular SATA SSD, which almost drove me nuts since the @#½&% BIOS was reset at one point, and I missed that the SATA-modes had been changed, so I kept getting “boot device inaccessible”, and a few very very careful inspection of all the settings later I was able to boot it up so that I could copy necessary data between the drives in different configurations.
I had to switch between these a few times, but now I think it’s doing just fine.
What an absolute nightmare this has been, thankfully there’s a solution to most problems. You just need to sort them out, one cluster-hump at a time.
Again, thanks.