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


Bello​:+1:t2::slightly_smiling_face:

Hi everyone,

I lost a full day trying to make my system work. Now I am on the second one!

I have an old system used to called pistol because at the time it was a beast! My M/B is EVGA nForce 780i SLI (no AHCI support) and I am trying to migrate win10 64-bit OS to a newly purchased Samsung 970 EVO plus mounted on an ICY BOX PCIx adapter. History is as such:

1. migrated OS with Samsung migrating software
2. tried with an old USB, launched Clover (non graphical) but NVMe was not recognized.
3. Had a spare SATA drive, installed clover there and launched (very nice option btw), boot in windows from the NVMe drive was present but ended up in black screen.
4. I thought maybe a clean install will help so I tried to mount installation USB. No installation media was found.
5. Burned win10 ISO in DVD, again there was no option to boot from DVD. Couldn’t install
6. Transferred install files to the spare partition of the SATA drive and there it was! Clover gave me option to run installation from there with fast speed as well.
7. I tried to do a startup repair in case I would be able to keep the old installation on the NVMe drive and skip the hassle of re-installing everything.
8. No go: "Startup Repair couldn’t repair your PC"
9. Tried clean installation but got this: "Windows can’t be installed on driveX partitionX. (show details)"
10. Clicked on show details gave "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer’s hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk’s controller is enabled int the computer’s BIOS menu."
11. Although I tried to skip the warning and installed, in the end I got message that installation failed and all changes are being reverted.

I had some suspicion that since in windows to make the NVMe controller accessible with 2 SATA drives already attached, I had to disable two instances of the NVidia RAID controller I though there might had something to do with that so I tried to disable all SATA devices. Again I couldn’t mount installation media!

Any suggestions?

UPDATE:
Used the NVMe drive on an ESXi installation (Linux) on another machine. After I put it back on the nForce machine, pressing F3 key on clover landing page adds 2 more options:

1. Boot UEFI internal from CLOVER
2. Boot UEFI internal from ESXi.

Option 2 works like a charm and ESXi loads perfectly!!! So it is possible to boot from NVMe only somehow not in windows!

@aphilgr1
i am not entirely sure what you are asking or trying to achieve?

however please copy the driver dxe file to all 4 of the locations mentioned in my pined update post to avoid having to press f3 in the future.

clover is just a graphical bootloader originally built for mac osx but it will happily boot almost any os including windows 10.
please not that you are required to always either use a usb stick as the first boot device or a sata hard drive either of which bios bootable devices can have clover installed to it.

please further clarify what you are trying to achieve ??

NOTE about trying to migrate/clone you are doing it all wrong please upgrade the existing windows installation to windows 10 via an inplace upgrade then perform a sysprep command to sysprep your installation ready for the clone process.
once sysprep is complete clone the now syspreped OS partitions to the new nvme. boot to the working clover select the new windows 10 from the nvme and boot to it.

Thanks for your reply!

The answer is that I cannot make the NVMe drive work in windows, either by migrating my old installation to it (tried twice with Samsung migrating assistant) or by installing a fresh one (windows 10 pro). The funny thing is that cloning a linux installation (ESXi) to the drive allows it to boot and run properly, but when I try to install windows on it I get the message

"Windows can’t be installed on driveX partitionX. (show details)"

When I press on “show details” I see

"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer’s hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk’s controller is enabled in the computer’s BIOS menu."

It seems somehow the disk is not visible as a booting device in windows although it is in Linux

that is the expected behavior windows will not see it as a bootable device as such… this is why we use clover to get around this issue … to install windows 10 from the dvd boot to clover then run the install dvd from within clover menu you should then be able to install to the disk. remember to ensure the nvme disk is formatted to GPT and is clearly showing in windows as a usable storage device before attempting to clone it again my advise is do not use the samsung tool and instead use sysprep as that is the microsoft tool.

I am already using clover and I am trying to install from within clover. That is my problem.

If I understand correctly, Clover BIOS environment is the one without GUI and UEFI is the one with GUI. Correct? To explain my situation, let’s assume this is correct. So for some reason I get the following symptoms:

- I tried to boot to clover with 3 different USB sticks, old 2G, 2Xnewer 16G and none would get me to UEFI (GUI). only BIOS (non GUI).
- Only when I installed clover on a spare SATA disk and boot from there, I got on the GUI environment of clover.
- Win10 installation USB (a good 128G usb3) is not appearing anywhere for me to initiate installation.
- Same goes for DVD. It is shown as a boot option in BIOS (non GUI) but when I select it, I get a black screen for a while and land back on the previous screen.
- I put the win10 install files on the empty partition of the SATA drive where I installed Clover. From there, I had the option to perform windows installation but got the aforementioned errors

Just 2 more questions
1. My Samsung 970 EVO Plus shows in boot manager as “EFI Misc Device”. Is this correct or it should have been “EFI Hard Drive” like the attached SATA disk?

2. Bootable USB Installation media wasn’t supposed to appear there as well?

I finally gave up on the nForce 780i SLI but I was lucky enough to find another m/b from the era (asus rampage formula) and everything went great! Very impressed with the outcome!

Now I only need to find a way to automatically boot on windows without delay. Tomorrow is my son’s birthday and I want to deliver the system ready. Hiding non bootable partitions would also be great!

Hello,

i read quite some of this topic, but can’t make it work. Right now i have DUET 2015 installed. It boots, with some red text in the beginning, then the menu shows up showing 6 disks i can boot. None of them seem to boot. When i enter dosmode, it does show me the blk** which i can enter and even the nvme (3 with longer text and 1 main i think) is shown there too. When i do like “blk10:” i can’t do the “dir” command it won’t show me any files, although i have cloned the ssd to nvme disk. Doesn’t matter whether it’s gpt or mbr. Could it be the driver isn’t working? I’ve copied it everywhere.

grtz

@aphilgr1
The Asus motherboard was a great choice and should be a bios modable board. Even better than clover.

To automatically boot Windows simply set the windows partition as the defualt volume in your config.plist file and set the timeout value to 0. Note I had trouble with mine and it turns out I had to edit 2 other values in the config.plist aswell to get the timeout to work. One was the language value however I cannot recall what the other one was but I am sure I found that out from searching on the forums about config.plist over on tonymacx86.

You can hide other menu entries from within the config.plist.

under the GUI key in the config.plist
create a new key called Hide
add an array

<key>Hide</key>
<array>
<string>entry to hide</string>
<string>entry 2 to hide</string>
</array>

to set the defualt boot volume (ie windows volume)

in the Boot key
if required add a new key called DefaultVolume
add the volume id string of the volume you wish to boot like this… here is mine as an example yours will have a different but similar looking string.
<key>DefaultVolume</key>
<string>2DACF133-8378-43FB-AC0F-560172D350FF</string>

@knightrider2003
Cloning a windows installation is a BAD idea it will NEVER boot unless you have syspreped the os first. That is beyond the scope of this thread though. As for the issue with the red text I have not observed this behavior before but I’m guessing it is some kind of error message ? Please provide more information. Ie what does it say ? The more information you give us the better we can help you.

@sibliss it says ‘startat’ in red, that’s it.

Installed in the system is also a pcie to sata converter.

@knightrider2003
to be clear, are you sure this is an error generated by clover ?
did you run the bdu to make your clover usb or hdd from that computer to start with ? it’s important you make it on the same computer you intend to boot with it as the BDU will generate a config profile to match only the hardware in that machine.
is the clover drive set as the first boot device in your bios boot order?
did you copy the driver to the 4 locations mentioned in my pinned post?
are you using a pcie nvme adapter card ? if so what card is it ? post a link maybe ?

@sibliss it’s a cheap chinese nvme card with pcie converter.
I’d like to install an older version of clover, but when i download it, it has only .pkg folders in it. How do i install an older clover version to usb?



please read the instructions at the start of this thread it provides a link to download the BDU which is a utility to install clover.



please read the instructions at the start of this thread it provides a link to download the BDU which is a utility to install clover.




I know that, i’d like an older version, but when i download one it’s a .pkg file. How do i install a pkg file to the usb?

@knightrider2003
why would you want an older version of clover ? the version in BDU is already pretty old.

clover is virtually impossible to install without the bdu unless you are running OSX the only other way to generate the config aside from the DBU is the clover configurator which is exclusive to OSX.



installed an older version and the error i mentioned earlier came out more clear. It says "BErrorart!" in red then doesn’t continue. So that means there is no config.plist. Probably clover just can’t read any of my disks.

@knightrider2003
https://www.win-raid.com/t3286f50-Guide-NVMe-boot-for-systems-with-legacy-BIOS-and-UEFI-board-DUET-REFIND-49.html#msg109729
https://www.win-raid.com/t3854f50-Understanding-the-process-Boot-from-USB-gt-OS-load-from-NVME.html
It’s no wonder i haven’t seen this message before, as it turns out this is a duet error not a clover error. however if i am not mistaken clover is actually built on a duet variant ?

I am sorry i cannot be alot of help with this.

Ok, i used the bcdutility. I don’t get any errors and there are 6 windows logo’s onscreen. If i press F3, the usb external pops up. What are those 6 windows logo button for?