Trying to boot from an m.2 drive through a PCIE adapter on an intel DX58SO

Special Topics NVMe Support for old Systems
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I’m sure there are walkthroughs specifically for this but i am a noob and wanted to ask first especially since everything i have read here pertains to windows, and not the OS i am using FreeNAS which is unix based. I have an intel DS58XO mobo that i had my OS(FreeNAS) and three data drives attached to, i needed to expand my server to hold 6 data drives, and still have a separate disk for the OS which is hard because the Mobo only has 6 sata ports. Through some searching i found a pcie to m.2 adapter (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FU9JS94/ref…i_oWWgFb7NJFJE9) i installed it and the board is able to read the m.2 as i was able to write to OS to the drive succesfully, but my bios doesn’t recognize it as a bootable drive. i was referred to here through another website saying there might be something i can do here with my legacy board. sorry if this is repost, i’ll gladly delete it. Any info is appreciated!

2

@svenEsven :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
Since your X58 chipset mainboard doesn’t have an UEFI BIOS, you will not be able to boot off a PCIe connected M.2 SSD (only known exception: Samsung’s 950 Pro SSD).
Nevertheless you will be able install the OS onto the M.2 SSD, but the boot sector has to be outside of it.
For details please have a look into >this<, >this< and >this< thread.
Good luck!
Dieter (alias Fernando)

3

Thanks a bunch! i’ll give it a look

4



do you mean NVMe ?
I don’t have UEFI on my mobos and would like to use a M2 SATA drive + PCI adapter + Windows XP.
is this possible ?

5

@caliber :
No matter, whether the M.2 SSD supports the AHCI or the NVMe protocol, it needs a specific UEFI module within the BIOS to be bootable.

6



sorry for my ignorance. I thought the AHCI driver was meant for M2 SATA only

in this pic I can see a NVMe class SSD with AHCI.

https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/6fa71e1…b29f080e48.jpeg

7

@caliber :
As your linked picture shows, there are 3 different types of M.2 SSDs:
1. NVMe ones (usually need an NVMe EFI BIOS module to be bootable),
2. AHCI ones (need a specific AHCI EFI BIOS module to be bootable) and
3. SATA ones (are connected to the chipset’s SATA Controller, don’t need an additional BIOS module).
So the SATA M.2 SSD is the only one, which may work with old systems without UEFI BIOS.

8



none of my mainboards has UEFI BIOS (AMD, i5 or i7 sockets)
I have read on the other thread this ‘‘Booting the NVME drive from non-UEFI legacy board’’
is this program like the grub4dos ? that inserts NVMe drivers into the SSD when you want to install Windows ?

you have also mentioned the Samsung 950 Pro…
do you think the current Samsung Pro series is able to achieve the same result without UEFI ?