[Guide] NVMe-boot w/o modding the BIOS (Clover-EFI method)

Yes. I installed v1803 from March 2018 and updated that few times.




Here’s what my disk management shows:

What filesystem is your 100 MB partition? It’s not showing as FAT32 as mine is…

@phusg
Have you created your EFI partition manually ?

I’m asking because :
1) It should be hidden, so file system shouldn’t be visible.
2) It’s name is wrong (ie. hidden partitions don’t have names, and default name is “EFI” not “EFI BOOT”).
3) In describtion, it should be refered to as “EFI System Partition” (it’s “Partycja systemowa EFI” in my case), and not “System, Active, Primary Partition”.

Hallo Dieter,

wie geht es?

Now in English.

Two things, 1 issue and 1 hint .

Hint
some people can’t from USB-install-medium in Clover; I made today a lot of tests and couldn’t first boot from my USB-Stick.
I chose in Clover “Boot Microsoft EFI cdboot from WIN10_P_180” (it’s my flash-drive) and I got an error.



With F3 (read under Help F1) I enabled “hidden” drives and chose “Boot UEFI external from WIN10_P_180” (still my flash-drive), not the first one! That was the “magic”!



Then on the first reboot I chose of course “Boot Microsoft EFI Boot from SYSTEM” and the installation has been continued; on this step I pulled out the flash-drive.



Now my issue:
on my MB G1.Sniper A88X (Gigabyte) I do not get the timer, on the other MB A88X-Pro (ASUS) I get the timer counting down until boot.
The Clover flash-drive is absolutely the same!

Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance.

Edit:
I love when the solution for my issue is on my monitor and I do not see it…

CLOVER detects the boot-partition for Windows 7 (my working-system) as “EFI” and so I did insert this name as “DefaultVolume”; for Windows 10 (my test-system) the boot-part is detected as “SYSTEM” by CLOVER (have a look to the third picture).
So I changed the string and the boot-timer was working again!

Thanks for the extra information agentx007. Anyone any ideas on how convert my presumably MBR system partition to a hidden EFI one and save my installation? This is the set-up and what I’ve just tried…

When upgrading to a NVMe drive I followed these instructions so that I avoided having to reinstall and configure windows 10 from scratch https://mrlithium.blogspot.com/2015/12/h…egacy-bios.html the guide BTW does need a small typo fixed in an important command line:

bcdboot L:\Windows /s K: /h UEFI
should be
bcdboot L:\Windows /s K: /f UEFI

So that’s why I have a 100MB system partition called EFI BOOT (I think MBR) which doesn’t have a drive letter but is nevertheless still not properly hidden.

This guide contains a good sounding technique to set a EFI partition with the hidden attribute https://superuser.com/questions/1114093/…e-efi-partition but if I follow that I end up with:

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DISKPART> list volume
 
Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
* Volume 0 D DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 E Audio CD CDFS DVD-ROM 602 MB Healthy
Volume 2 EFI_BOOT FAT32 Partition 100 MB Healthy System
Volume 3 C NTFS Partition 223 GB Healthy Boot
 
DISKPART> select volume 2
 
Volume 2 is the selected volume.
 
DISKPART> attributes volume
Read-only : No
Hidden : No
No Default Drive Letter: No
Shadow Copy : No
 
DISKPART> attributes volume set hidden
 
Virtual Disk Service error:
This operation is not allowed on the current boot, system or pagefile
volume. It is also not allowed on any volume on a basic MBR disk that contains
the boot, system or pagefile volume.
 

So it may well be a MBR drive (the guide I followed sets it up as such) or maybe I'm missing a MBR master boot sector, which was something that the guide mentioned and I think I managed to skip to eventually get everything up and running (until this major window update):



Anyone any ideas on how convert this MBR system partition to a hidden EFI one or otherwise save my installation? Reinstalling windows on a legacy bios with nvme drive and then configuring everything the way I now have it would take me days so I’d be extremely grateful :slight_smile:

Has anyone used grub2 instead of clover/etc for this purpose? If yes, can you please share how you did it? Thanks

@phusg First and foremost : Congratulations !
You managed to make a MBR style bootable NVMe drive :slight_smile:

That is also the core issue for update :
Windows doesn’t like MBR NVMe style drives (it assumes NVMe = UEFI boot = GPT, and it get’s an error when it tries to do GPT only things, to a MBR drive).

To get past that error, I guess you would have to install it fresh on GPT style drive (sadly you can only convert a MBR boot drive after you wipe it :/).

When I try to boot the clover USB drive it seams to crash the onyl thing displayed on the screen is the number 6 and that’s it o can not do anything but ctrl+alt+del
Anyone had such an issue already?

EDIT: I progressed a bit further when booting the drive with UEFI and not with BIOS i get:
… scan entries …

unfortunately it hangs there and nothing more happens
Anyone had such an issue already?
how can i fix that?

hello guys , I spend many hours on this still not able to boot my NVME samsung pm 981 via msi z expander pci express adaptater , I cloned my working W10 pro sata ssd to my Nvme , when I removed all my drive and put only NVME samsung and boot via HIREN CD BOOT in usb it can see my nvme files but impossible to boot on it via clover , duet or Rfind…

if somebody can share and ready to usb files for Z800 , will appreciate … thanks in advance guys !!

AFAIK the only way to get it to work by cloning your existing windows is by following the original mrlithium method https://mrlithium.blogspot.com/2015/12/h…egacy-bios.html

Be prepared for a lot of work/fiddling to finally get it to work though. And furthermore it seems like the MBR style bootable NVMe drive you end up with cannot be updated to Windows 1809 and beyond. That’s my situation and I’m currently pondering how long I can live without the updates vs reinstalling windows from scratch or maybe trying a dual boot to linux again and seeing if that can finally do everything I want and can do with windows.

If anyone knows another method for cloning windows to a GBP style bootable NVMe drive on a legacy bios we’d be very happy to hear from you!


I got below error on my Z800 2x5649 Xeon

still not wokr with duet I leave it , but good news works with clover now !!!

finally , figure out my issue here my step I did on my Z800 bi Xeon 5649 with 128G of Ram ,NVME PM981 SAMSUNG via Adaptator MSI Xpander Z on slot 2 pci e x16
-dl BDU_v2.1.2018.023b
-created bootable usb key via BDU http://cvad-mac.narod.ru/index/bootdiskutility_exe/0-5
-once done , copy file on your new usb created " F:\EFI\CLOVER\drivers-Off\drivers64UEFI\NvmExpressDxe-64.efi" to folders “F:\EFI\CLOVER\drivers64” and "F:\EFI\CLOVER\drivers64UEFI" to load nvme drivers !
-Prepared WIN10 iso via Rufus 3.5 , choose list usb disk and format ntfs , partition type GPT uefi/csm .
-plug your two usb key windows and clover
-boot on your USB clover press F3 on cover boot menu, boot on your win key usb uefi ,“boot UEFI external from UEFI_NTFS”


-install win10 on your nvme , prior to install it , delete all partition in your nvme disk !
-after install , win10 will reboot, start again with clover usb and boot on your nvme by chosing , “BOOT MICROSOFT EFI from BOOT” ,

-and your are done !!!

here some capture …

I got better perf on live hiren cd boot than win10pro nvme…




WIN10 PRO nvme

Just signed up and wanted to say it works on the Optiplex 790. I bought a NVME PICE adapter off aliepxress and booting Windows 10 off of it and 10.13.6 on a sata SSD.



Did you get it to work? I have similar error on Dell T5500 Xeon E5530. Originally posted here

Pic



Did you get it to work? I have similar error on Dell T5500 Xeon E5530. Originally posted here

Pic



ya it’s working follow my tuto

Thx for tut - I got it working by mostly following it. I had to use DVD ISO.

Zitat von agentx007 im Beitrag #72

In config.plist file (EFI\Clover\Config.plist), I set :
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<key>DefaultLoader</key>
<string>\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi</string>
<key>DefaultVolume</key>
<string>EFI</string>
 

<key>DefaultLoader</key>
<string>\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi</string>
<key>DefaultVolume</key>
<string>EFI</string>
If this is setup correctly, there should be a countdown timer under "Boot Microsoft EFI from EFI" text.

Could you add this new info to "3b optional" section of the Guide ?


Agree - should be added to the first post.
[edit] those look like pipes in the quote, but it is actually backslash.

Thanks for the guide!

Will this work for dual booting with GRUB too? I’m looking at a Crucial P1 for my Lenovo X1 Carbon gen3

Hey I am going to upgrade my asus p6t rig with some nvme drive but yet haven’t decided which one i should buy, with Clover any nvme ssd will work? I’ve read on some other forums that any drive is going to work but I want to ask before i buy.
Thanks in advance for your responses! :slight_smile:

This NvmeExpress… file was not attached to the paste. I found the flie for download, anyways…I did the guide but Im not sucessful, windows installation doenst got able to work with the ssd (sansung evo 970). Something like "not able to create a partition or locate an existing one". For now, just showing my ssd are fine. Got a lot of work yet…