[Guide] NVMe-boot without modding your UEFI/BIOS (Clover-EFI bootloader method)

Special Topics NVMe Support for old Systems
197

Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini E350 AMD Dual Core E350 Series Mainboard . l had this APU motherboard lying around ,so using PCI-E adapter and nvme bought from AliExpress decided to give Clover a try. I was not expecting a result but was pleasantly surprised when,on second attempt,Clover recognised windows installation and installed Windows 10. I placed driver in Uefi folder and just edited boot time delay to 3 seconds. It has speeded up system dramatically baring in mind it was always bad performing setup originally. Thanks

198

Hello I want to contribute with my build as I was able to run my NVME evo on my Desktop
Equipment; Asus B85m-g LGA 1150, 4th Gen core i5, 2x8gig memory sticks, my board has no m.2 slot onboard.

I wanted to load a new; Evo 960 m.2 with mKEY 250gig using a generic m.2 to PCIe 4x adaptor card.

I. Physical problems solved:
1. I bought a generic m.2 to PCIe 4x adaptor card from a China mail order company for $15 shipped.
2. Almost all of the adaptors have PCIe4X cards and I only have a PCI 1x slot to spare on my mobo.
3. Following some tutorials online, I cut the extra legs off the PCI adaptor. Leaving me with only 7 pins on the data side.


4, After much cutting and filing, I then slipped the adaptor into my mob’s PCIe 1x slot. No smoke so far so everything was okay.
5. I then turned off the PC loaded the Evo m.2 on the PCI adaptor and inserted the adaptor into the mobo slot.
5. Without a hitch PC turned on, booted normally not my current windows 10 installation. Win 10 saw the m.2 and without a hitch I formatted it and used it as a data drive for a while and it worked properly. NOTE that at this point I was using my old INTEL SSD with windows 10 as my primary boot disk
6. But. like most people here, i wanted to use the evo as a bootdisk so…

WARNING: don’t cut the card and even after cutting it don’t stick it into your board, UNLESS you are prepared to fry your board, brick your mobo, burn something, injure yourself or suffer some form of injury or loss.

II. Software problems somewhat solved.
1. To prepare the NVEM as my primary windows 10 bootdisk, while piggybacking on the PCIE adaptor, I did the following settings on my BIOS;
a. Load defaults
b. changed boot disk to UEFI "USB CLOVER DISK"
c. changed some settings on the mobo BIOS




2. I then booted into the clover USB.
- To prepare the clover USB Bootdisk, I just formatted the USB to FAT 32 and dragged TONY54’s files into it and the USB was ready. Thank you Tony54 for that. BTW I used an 8 gig USB
3. I then went into the clover menu to set it to boot into UEFI DVD. My Windows 10 disk was in the DVD drive. I planned to load windows using my Win10 DVD.
4. Who you load into the windows installation procedure go through all the normal procedures up to the point where you are asked to choose the DISK where you will install your windows.
5. In the windows install page where you are being ask to choose what disk to load windows on to, press SHIFT+F12, this will open the command prompt.
6. Use diskpart to prepare the disk for GPT, you can use the first part of this guide; https://youtu.be/kKtkizioHRs, but note that I formatted my drive using NTFS instead of FAT 32 as used in the tutorial.
6. I then loaded windows 10 in the normal fashion
7. On the first reboot intercept the Clover boot sequence. Choose the tab where windows will boot in the NVME. In your case there might be several Hard disk choices, choose the first one and work your way from there until you find the harddrive/partition where you loaded your windows.
8. Windows will restart several times, just click okay. cI chose express settings.
8. Windows loaded, I now run windows normally except for some hiccup below.

Update
1. I now boot from the clover installation on my internal SATA3 internal hard drive. I made a small 100MB partition on my hard drive and formatted it with FAT32. I then copied all the files in my Clover USB boot disk (which previously worked). I edited the config.plist on the UEFI partition on the Hard disk and changed all USB entries into HDD, now I boot through the clover boot disk on my hard drive. The USB Clover is being kept for emergency , in case the hard drive fails in the future. I can’t say the HDD boot is faster that the USB boot disk, its just that I feel more comfortable that my boot disk is not dangling form the outside of my PC.
2. I also installed a PCIe 1X to 16X riser (ribbon type). What it dos is I insert the PCIe 1x on the mother board and the other end is a PCIe 16x slot. Often the extra PCIe 1x slot where we install the m.2 is beside the graphics card. Using the extension/riser I was able to move the m.2 ssd far away from the graphics card so the heat of the graphics card reach and affect the ssd.


Thanks to all

199

Thanks for that. Finally got my Kingston K1000 flying on my 11 year old Dell Precision T7400 PC :slight_smile:

Haven’t managed to find a way to get clover to boot windows automatically, which I’d like to hear if possible, as Clover boots much faster than the DUET I’m now using. Had many problems making a DUET bootdisk, for full details see my DUET REFIND thread post here [Guide] NVMe-boot for systems with legacy BIOS and older-UEFI (DUET-REFIND) (24)

Check that post for how to not have to reinstall windows when migrating to nvme on legacy bios!

Re rar5 compression: I didn’t realise there were newer versions of compression algorithms even being made (trading backwards-compatibility and for a few percent smaller files doesn’t make much sense to me).

After upgrading my 6 year old winrar 4.10 to the latest version I could unpack. Uninstalling the old version surprisingly cleared up 10GB of drive space, even though I regularly use windows disk cleanup also on the tmp drive.

200


You have to modify the file config.plist (ascii-editor):

1
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3
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5
 
<key>DefaultLoader</key>
<string>\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi</string>
<key>DefaultVolume</key>
<string>EFI</string>
 
 


you can modify the time CLOVER waits to boot:

1
2
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<key>Timeout</key>
<integer>3</integer>
 
 
201

I want sooo badly to make this work, but after 3 full days of cursing at it, I have so far been unsuccessful. Sigh!
I recently acquired a used HP Z600 workstation from 2011 with a legacy BIOS. But despite it’s age, its a real beast , with dual 6-core Xeon 5690s and 48GB of ECC RAM! The drive however is the big bottleneck. The built in SATA ports are only SATA II 3GB/s, and although I got a SATA III PCIe controller to work, it still only allocates 1 lane limiting it to under 4 GB/s. I bought a Samsung 970 Pro Nvme M2 drive and a PCIe adapter knowing ahead of time that it would not work out of the box, that some hacking would be required. I had already found and bookmarked this page and some others.

I have gotten Clover successfully put onto a USB stick, and it boots just fine. But it does not see the NVMe drive. If I go to the EFI shell and type “drivers”, the NvmExpressDxe-64.efi driver is listed (last) as being loaded. If I type fs0: I can get the Clover USB drive. but if I type fs1:, fs2: etc. it does not find a drive. The NVMe drive has several partitions, but the first one is 500MB, FAT32, Active, and should be bootable. I’ve run BCDBoot and BootRec on it. The next partition is 220GB, NTFS, Active, and has Windows 10 Pro on it. It should be bootable as well. In addition to Clover, I’ve also tried Duet. I consider myself very computer literate, although this is a bit out of my area of expertise. I have followed all the instructions to a “T” and gone thru all the steps numerous times. Could someone please provide some troubleshooting and diagnostic assistance ?

Other info: Being a dual Xeon machine, the chipset is Intel 5520. It has the most recently released BIOS v3.60 Rev.A, Apr 14, 2016. It’s the C2 version with the 1/07/10 boot block. If I boot Windows 10 from the SATA SSD, I can see, read, and write to the NVMe as a secondary drive, no prob. Likewise if I boot from a Windows PE boot disk such as Gandalf’s Redstone Utilities, I can (and have) clone to it. Likewise, Windows 10 Install media sees the drive, but can’t (won’t) allow me to install to it since it doesn’t have boot support from the BIOS.

Help! Please! (Thanks in advance and good Karma to you!)

202

Hi, my friend had as a ASUS Evo2 board and a PAtriot Scorch M.2 Drive. The problem he is having is that Clover gets stuck at scan entries please help!

203

hi, I am new here.
I am excited to hear these nvme ssd can boot and run in legacy bios! So I tried but not successful. Need help
The nvme 970 evo ssd works fine in windows 10 as storage: read ~1600MB/s, write ~1400MB/s in 2nd pcie slot x16 (x8). However, the adapter is running at x4

1/ I tried the link in Tony54 #188 but after extracting from RAR to usb. That usb could not boot into CLOVER (I know how to set boot order in bios). So please check that file again.
2/ I went back and followed the guide from beginning. Download file BDU from the link #1 and followed all the steps (except edit plist). NOTE: you must have internet in order to download and extracting files! I made the usb boot into CLOVER. In CLOVER I can see my NVME ssd, the usb with windows 10 installer. But when click on the "icon hd of usb windows 10 installer", it says drive error. Hang without installation.
3/ I suspected I need to make new bootable windows 10 installation (for new uefi). Search on internet, I found it can be made by Rufu or directly from MS. I make both USBs.
4/ Boot into CLOVER, I see my icon NVME ssd on the right, icon USB legacy, icon USB efi. Click on icon USB efi, the red letter x64! and other marks appear on the screen!!!.
5/ Restart, boot into CLOVER. Click on icon USB legacy, drive error.

Help please.

My system GA-ep45-ud3p
Cpu QX9650 running at 3.8ghz
16gb ddr2 , Radeon HD 7750
Samsung 970 evo 250GB with adapter in 2nd pcie 2.0 x16 (x8)

204

The Tony file. When you extract
It to the USB it’s extracted into a folder. You have to manually move all the files from the folder to the root of the USB.

205

I tried both ways. 1st just extract and copy those files into usb, NOT working. 2nd make bootable usb and copy those files, NOT working.

206

@Caferhum What version of rufus do you use ?
Have you seen/tried my method (YT video from post #129) ?

207

@agentx007 I downloaded the newest version of Rufus and use how to https://www.windowscentral.com/how-creat…ia-uefi-support
* I saw the video, but “sorry” I felt asleep. I will try to see it again sometime (it’s too long and with too much un-needed info.)

208

@Caferhum That’s why I added timestamps in the description :smiley:
Just check part with creating USB ISO.
Pretty sure, that’s where the problem is.

If problem persists however, I recommend changing Clover version.
You can also try the one I used (can be downloaded from google drive).

209

@agentx007 Thank you. I will follow your instruction and try again if this weekend I don’t have to work OT.
The last effort is going with Samsung 950 pro which has option ROM, but it has been outdated and very expensive. I saw a guy put Samsung 950 pro in his GA-ep45-ud3p (same as mine) and it is shown is bios normally.

210

Well, Clover works beyond BIOS.
It’s BIOS => Clover => NVMe/PCI-e.
For normal NVMe to be working/visible under BIOS, you need EFI boot loader in BIOS.
950 Pro is exception to that rule (like you said - it has Legacy Op-Rom build-in).

211

@agentx007 I tried to watch through your video with "scan-pass"; however, your version is old and for windows 7. It is not the same as windows 10. I skipped your video and search for the cause. I found the problem. Somehow the new version of BDU downloads and extracts clover into USB then manages to boot from CD/DVD ! NOT from USB. After searching the cause, I found one person suggested to use command from the Shell> fs0:\EFI\boot\bootx64.efi (or fs1:\EFI\boot\bootx64.efi depends on which is your USB installation)

Finally, I have SUCCESSFULLY installed windows 10 into nvme sdd and made nvme 970 evo boot into windows 10.

For now, every time I boot my computer, it goes into clover first. I have to manually choose nvme ssd hd to boot into windows 10. I remembered some member configured plist to auto boot into windows.

212

Hi, guys!
Very interesting theme and forum. Several times I re-read it. And here the same I did all necessary with Clover and it turned out on my 6th summer computer with Legacy BIOS to make my NVMe SSD as a boot drive.
Thanks to all who took part.
p.s. Sorry for my english.

1 Like
213

Good evening and sorry for my English but I use a translator because I do not know him.
After months and months of searching by mistake I found this forum, and this page, I have a 2008 workstation with a UEFI embryonic bios, but following this guide I managed to install NVMe with boot, thanks for your work.
Soon I will take pictures.
I have a problem, my is a PCI-e 2.0 but it is revealed as 1.1, and I have not automate the start yet, but I have no hurry.

214

Good evening, I have not had time to take pictures and more, but I have to thank you for the opportunity that you shared, the system now seems reborn, travels smooth as oil, made tests disabling in my UEFI (2008) and works great I hope to find the material time to share a positive experience with an old PC of 2008, and that serves others.

215

PCIE 1.1 is often due to down-clock power-saving like features @by_xfile� if you didn’t already figure that out. Put a load on the graphics card and check it again with GPU-z, I bet it then goes up to 2.0. If not, this can sometimes be fixed by removing the card and plugging back in, or by updating or downgrading drivers sometimes too

216

I joined this forum to thank OP, this post and all the contributors. Though my questions and inquiries were not addressed by any single post, I was able to piece together enough information to get this working on my HP Z800. I had a summary written here first but lost it. I ended up writing it out on steemit but I’ll paste it here.

Load & Boot from Win10 on NVME/PCI-e on HP Z800
https://steemit.com/hp/@fobio/load-win10…ci-e-on-hp-z800

This will be part one of a multi-part series [fingers crossed] covering my attempt to modify a HP Z800 workstation into file, plex and web server housed in a XL-ATX full size tower with 14 drives. I have been dabbling in hardware and software mods for around 20 yrs and I know this is by no means difficult but as a DIY’er this is one of the more daunting yet doable mods at a low price and I believe the bang-for-buck is right up there for an hobbyist looking for something to do over the winter.

A little more background. I have a home lab server running a AMD FX8320 w/ 32GB ram, a M1015 crossflashed to LSI 9211-8i HBA IT mode hosting 13 drives for around 36TB or 24TB usable under Parity mode. This is all managed under Win10 Pro and Windows Storage Spaces. I’ve spent quite a bit of time reading about it over the past couple of years and despite its slow write speeds, it serves its purpose as a Plex Media Server and NextCloud host. After the recent Win10 1809 update, I started to notice the system starting to hiccup and I noticed a lot of errors within Event Viewer. Some I fixed thru tutorials and regedit, but others just won’t go away…namely, IO and write errors to my array which is being updated with Seagate 8TB backup/SMR drives that are cheap TB-per-$ but slow as hell in write performance. Again this is not an issue for my media library mainly for Plex. So I started looking at upgrades.

I always wanted to try server grade equipment but was always put off by their price and footprint; you don’t get much room to install racks in a condo. Anyway, I came upon these HP workstations that have server innards but in workstation form factor. The Z600 and Z800 offers dual Xeon’s and room for lotsa ram and there’s a batch on sale locally. Initially, I only needed a Z600 in its small form factor to play with but I kept reading about the slightly sexier Z800. Being blinded by the prospect of playing with new hardware, I didn’t consider some important specifics, like UEFI vs legacy BIOS on these systems. But by this time, my mind was already going a mile a second and I’ve already plunged into this project.

First off, I was inspired by this post to attempt this.

Hacking the HP Z800 Xeon motherboard into a standard case
http://andybrown.me.uk/2intergrate014/11/01/z800/

Much smarter guys have done this awhile back and I’m just catching up. But not being an IT professional, I don’t get access to this level of equipment until they come cheap on the used market. I ended up with a full system with its OEM case for around $600 CDN:

HP Z800
Dual Xeon X5680 @ 3.33 GHz [12 cores/24 threads total, 130w TDP each]
48GB DDR3 ECC 10600 RAM [upgradeable]

I got a barebones system and needed to add my own GPU and drives. I added a GTX 1060 3GB and a WD 256 NVME SSD on a PCI-e adapter. This is where it gets …interesting. As the updated BIOS doesn’t support NVME storage, I had to get creative with my kiddy-scripting, read: combining best practices and trial and error them into a workable solution. The following is after around 10 to 12 hrs of research:

Step 1:

After much searching, I finally chanced upon this site and this post that talks about using Clover, a Hackintosh tool to provide UEFI boot. I downloaded the tool, burned a USB and fumbled around with it and was able to read the transplanted WD NVME on the first try…sweet! But it was the Win10 install from the AMD rig and I want the system to be fully activated so I attempted to get Clover to read my USB Win10 UEFI install media. After many hours of trial and error, Iwas not and still am not able to get Clover to read my USB Win10 install.

[Guide] NVMe-boot without modding your UEFI/BIOS (Clover-EFI bootloader method)
[Guide] NVMe-boot without modding your UEFI/BIOS (Clover-EFI bootloader method)

[Looking back now, I imagine that Clover is either missing drivers to read a GPT USB in UEFI or that the USB key isn’t formatted correctly as GPT for Clover to see it. We re-visit this down below]

There are 2 posts in this thread that I need to acknowledge.

First, this post by Charlie confirming that it can be done:

[Guide] NVMe-boot without modding your UEFI/BIOS (Clover-EFI bootloader method) (11)

Second, circling back, we have this post by Plawerth that actually summarizes how to structure the Clover USB:

[Guide] NVMe-boot without modding your UEFI/BIOS (Clover-EFI bootloader method) (10)

I encourage anyone reading this to read and read Plawerth’s post as using his file structure helped me narrow down where to copy the NvmExpressDxe-64.efi file. I originally got my transplanted NVME working by just copying NvmExpressDxe-64.efi from \EFI\CLOVER\drivers-Off\drivers64\drivers64UEFI\ to \EFI\CLOVER\drivers64\ and \EFI\CLOVER\drivers64UEFI.

Step 2:
Since a clean install won’t work, I went back to a tried and true method of doing this a few yrs back…install Win7 first. This was painless once I dug out a Win7 install and flashed it onto a USB for legacy BIOS boot. I realized this from this post:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help…indows-7-and-wi

Specifically:

"Method 2
Restart from media, and install Windows 7 from media to a disk that attaches other storage controllers (such as SATA).
Press Ctrl+Shift+F3 to enter audit mode during the Out-of-box experience (OOBE) process.
Install the hotfix package, and then restart the computer.
Reseal the system by using the sysprep - generalize - shutdown options.
Capture and move the generalized image to the disk that attaches the NVMe controller."

I realized that I might as well clone the WinX install over to the NVME, like what had happened originally with the transplanted NVME from the AMD rig. But Win7 doesn’t support NVME natively.

Step 3:


After Win7 is installed on a SSD and activated, I proceeded with upgrading it to Win10 1809. A sidenote about 1809, it’s buggy as hell, but my server updated automatically and the Storage Spaces got upgraded as well and it can no longer be recognized or read by earlier versions. You can easily get this media off of Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool. However, since 1809 is so buggy, it’s actiually been pulled by M$ as of this writing, so I had to figure out how to get it to download. I found this:

How to download Windows 10 version 1809 right now
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/26/how-to…1809-right-now/

After the download, I flashed the ISO using Rufus onto a USB key and inplace installed within Win7.

Step 4:
After Win10 is installed, I can now see the NVME drive. Using a preferred disk cloner, I cloned the SSD over the NVME.

Step 5:
At this point, Clover will not boot into the NVME as it’s a clone of a Win10 install in MBR. Again, I just wanted to plow over this with a clean install but I still can’t. Good thing is that unlike years ago, you can now convert Win10 in-place from MBR to GPT for UEFI boot:

Shifting from BIOS to UEFI with the Windows 10 Creators Update MBR2GPT disk conversion tool
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/W…date/td-p/60064

I got the original tip from here:

https://audiocricket.com/2016/12/31/boot…ment-3550482711

"takis Audio Cricket • a year ago
I managed to boot after cloning.
You need to:

clone windows with your favourite tool
convert your CLONED drive to UEFI using the new windows 10 command:
mbr2gpt /convert /disk:2 /allowfullos
—PLEASE REPLACE DISK NUMBER WITH THE CLONED PARTITION!!!
boot as normal using your instructions."
However, this is not all of it.

Step 6:
Using a Clover USB modified according to the Clover/NVME thread, I was able to boot into the NVME thru UEFI. The above commands did the bulk of the conversion, but left me without a Recovery Partition on the NVME after the conversion. I got stressed a bit but found this:

Windows 10: Windows Recovery Environment
https://www.tenforums.com/installation-u…nvironment.html

I ran these commands and was able to confirm in DiskPart that the ~500mb partition is now set as recovery:

reagentc /disable
reagentc /setreimage /path R:\Recovery\WindowsRE [this line might have errored out for me]
reagentc /enable
reagentc /info

This set of commands in an admin CMD window created the Recovery Partition. You can confirm this thru DiskPart:

diskpart
list disk
select disk #
list partition

Step 7:
I want Win10 to boot on the NVME like normal without me confirming the boot disk thru Clover everytime. I modified the config.plist at the following:

[key]DefaultVolume[/key]
[string]EFI[/string]

and

[key]Timeout[/key]
[integer]2[/integer]

This boots into Clover and gives me 2 seconds to choose or stop Win10 boot. However, I followed Plawerth’s post and pared the config.plist file down to its bare essentials for Windows boot using the above substitutions and now it boots almost immediately into windows after POST.

Great success!

If you’ve read this far, I thank you. If I’ve missed something please let me know. The next step is to replicate the functions of the old server and migrating cards over. I’m already running into the next set of issues! And this is all before I test fit the mobo to the case I chose. Stay tuned!

tl;dr

1. Follow NVME/Clover thread to set up Clover USB.
2. Install Win7 on SSD thru legacy BIOS.
3. Upgrade Win7 to Win10, in-place within Win7.
4. Install cloner and clone Win10 SSD to NVME
5. Log into Win10 on SSD and convert NVME from MBR to GPT.
6. Use Clover USB to boot into Clover and choose, start Windows EFI to boot into NVME.
7. Use reagentc.exe commands to rebuild Recovery Partition on Win10 NVME.
8. Clean up Clover boot USB files and leave the USB key in for every boot.

I hope this helps someone like myself.

EDIT by Fernando: To save space and for a better readability I have put the steps of your guide into “spoilers”.