M.2 not showing nor booting

[Dawelio]

Heya guys,

So I previously ordered an ASUS MAXIMUS XI FORMULA motherboard and everything seems to work fine, except that my Samsung 970 Evo 2TB M.2 SSD isn’t showing up in the BIOS.

If I go to Advanced tab and look at PCI stuff, it shows up perfectly. But nothing shows up in the ”Boot” tab, only my ASUS ROG RUYO cooler for some reason.

Anyone have any idea on what is going on? As I’ve never encountered this before, where my M.2 drive isn’t showing up in the Boot tab/order.

Thanks,
Dawelio

 

[NeverBackDown]

BIOS update.

 

[Dawelio]

BIOS update.

Right, so updated to the latest BIOS and still the same. Only difference now, is that ”Boot Option Priorities” are completely greyed out and no bootable drive is detected.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Go into advanced settings?

Also make sure it's in the correct m.2 slot as well as making sure the slot doesn't get unused when you have SATA cables connected to specific ports. Doubt it but worth a look..

Also make sure the drive is working and not defective.

 

[Warchild]

you might need to shift your sata connected SSD to slots 4,5 or 6. Especially if you have a sound card installed also.

 

[Dawelio]

Go into advanced settings?

Also make sure it's in the correct m.2 slot as well as making sure the slot doesn't get unused when you have SATA cables connected to specific ports. Doubt it but worth a look..

Also make sure the drive is working and not defective.

Well I tried both M.2 slots and the same result on both unfortunately.

The drive is working, as it’s functioning just fine on my old board.

you might need to shift your sata connected SSD to slots 4,5 or 6. Especially if you have a sound card installed also.

I don’t have any other drives, I only have this M.2 SSD. So nothing connected to the SATA ports or so.

And no internal extra cards, and no extra drives. My system is quite bare in that sense.

 

[Excalabur50]

Sounds like a board issue rather than a drive issue if it works in another system, what does the user manual say about installing an M.2 is there a step you're missing? If not then it may be RMA time on the board, and if it's a Z390 get rid of the 4 phase heap and get a better board.

 

[Dawelio]

Sounds like a board issue rather than a drive issue if it works in another system, what does the user manual say about installing an M.2 is there a step you're missing? If not then it may be RMA time on the board, and if it's a Z390 get rid of the 4 phase heap and get a better board.

This is what the manual says:

No idea what you mean with ”get rid of the 4 phase heap”, but the board is basically their top end, so not sure how I would get ”a better board”.

 

[Excalabur50]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLO-vYjJN-I

Watch this video and RMA the board and swap to something else

 

[Dawelio]

Right, so discovered what the issue was... I ordered a 2nd one and it had the same issue. Now I’m on my 3rd and it has finally shown my 970 Evo in the boot options and boots into Windows.

I had to change something under ”NVMe CMS Compability”, which I changed to both UEFI and Legacy and then it all worked.

Although, I’ve tried Googling it, but still don’t get it... What is this ”Legacy” and ”UEFI”? What is the difference?... Is the difference ”Legacy” the old blue BIOS which you controlled with your keybord and ”UEFI” is the new BIOS layout, with mouse cursor etc?

Or have I understood something incrorrectly here?...

 

[AlienALX]

Right, so discovered what the issue was... I ordered a 2nd one and it had the same issue. Now I’m on my 3rd and it has finally shown my 970 Evo in the boot options and boots into Windows.

I had to change something under ”NVMe CMS Compability”, which I changed to both UEFI and Legacy and then it all worked.

Although, I’ve tried Googling it, but still don’t get it... What is this ”Legacy” and ”UEFI”? What is the difference?... Is the difference ”Legacy” the old blue BIOS which you controlled with your keybord and ”UEFI” is the new BIOS layout, with mouse cursor etc?

Or have I understood something incrorrectly here?...

UEFI is where the OS has access to the bios so can do some cool stuff. Like using the BIOS pic as the loading screen ETC. It goes further than that, but yeah. Legacy is the old boot method. Legacy does not work on NVME or PCIE drives unless they have a switch. You get those cool 3D bioses too, and it allows Windows to store your key in the bios so you don't need to keep activating it.

Legacy is what it sounds like, old hat. Everything is UEFI now.

 

[Dawelio]

UEFI is where the OS has access to the bios so can do some cool stuff. Like using the BIOS pic as the loading screen ETC. It goes further than that, but yeah. Legacy is the old boot method. Legacy does not work on NVME or PCIE drives unless they have a switch. You get those cool 3D bioses too, and it allows Windows to store your key in the bios so you don't need to keep activating it.

Legacy is what it sounds like, old hat. Everything is UEFI now.

Right, well I’m unfortunately not any smarter... Although the reason for asking being as there are few options regarding SATA, PCI express and one more which I don’t remember right now and each one you can select one of 3 choices: None, Legacy only or UEFI only. And this is what I’m unsure which it should be etc...

 

[AlienALX]

Right, well I’m unfortunately not any smarter... Although the reason for asking being as there are few options regarding SATA, PCI express and one more which I don’t remember right now and each one you can select one of 3 choices: None, Legacy only or UEFI only. And this is what I’m unsure which it should be etc...

Keep it to UEFI dude. M.2 NVME usually only support UEFI. It's rare that you will see an SSD now (M.2 and PCIE) that supports legacy. My old Asus RAIDR had a switch for Legacy Mode, but it was broken. You could see the drive but you could not boot from it. So it was storage mode only.

 

[looz]

Setting you're talking about might be the boot mode in which case...

UEFI boot requires GPT partitioning (as opposed to old MBR) and EFI System Partition on the drive you're booting from.

You can't swap from BIOS boot to UEFI boot on the fly if your Windows installation was done on BIOS, you need legacy mode in order to be able to boot.

But unless you're preserving an old boot drive, there's little reason to use Legacy boot.