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I recently bought an nvme drive and attached it to my asus P8H77-I motherboard via a PCIe-NVME (or PCIe-M.2, not sure what the proper name is) adapter. I did this in an attempt to replace the HDD that my computer was currently running on which made it slow.

I then created a bootable USB using Rufus and the same version of Windows that my computer was currently running (19041.1.191206-1406 x64), and installed it onto the new NVME drive. However, I couldn't get it to actually boot from the NVME drive, it would always boot from the C: drive (which was the HDD).

So, I unplugged the HDD (and the other two disks I was running as well) and re-tried to install Windows 10 to the new drive (in an attempt to strip out unnecessary details and figure out what the issue was). Weirdly, it seems that the installation media was able to successfully install Windows onto the new drive (thus my computer can see the NVME drive), but when I go into BIOS, there's no option to boot from it.

However, when I change the CSM settings in the BIOS to be able to boot from UEFI first, legacy BIOS second (instead of UEFI only), I get the option to boot from the NVME drive, however, when I try to boot from this, I get this error:

Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key.

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  • NVMe drives do not typically support CSM being enabled. Why are you booting into Legacy Mode if you are going to install Windows 10? Disable CSM, enable Secure Boot, and validate Rufus is using the optimal recommended configuration to create an UEFI compatible install media. We need specific information on this adapter you are using and specific information on the NVMe drive. Be sure you edit your question instead of replying with a comment. Additionally all specifications must be written in English or an English translation provided
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jun 27 at 7:37
  • It’s very possible the adapter you purchased cannot and will not allow you to boot to the drive. Your motherboard does not have native support for NVMe drives since it no support for NVMe M.2 drives.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jun 27 at 7:44

1 Answer 1

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Booting from NVMe devices is something your motherboard firmware needs to support properly. It seems yours doesn't. No way to teach it (unless you're Asus). And, for Windows 10 and 11 you want to be in EFI mode, not "generally mixed up legacy and EFI mode that we call CSM".

So, workaround would be having a SATA device, potentially very small, installed alongside your NVMe SSD. Your current HDD, wiped, would do. Install Windows to the NVMe SSD, and install a boot loader, able to chain-load the Windows bootloader, to the SATA drive. Here's an answer that describes that.

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  • Thanks for your answer, why would it be possible to load chain-load the windows boot manager (which could reside on the NVME drive, if I'm getting you correctly) from a boot loader (such as GRUB)? Is it something to do with the fact that grub already did all of the "heavy lifting" in making the NVME drive usable by the time it comes time to boot from the windows boot loader, so it isn't actually performing a "cold boot", and already has access to the NVME drive?.
    – Seamus Pitcher
    Commented Jul 2 at 13:14
  • it does a chain-loading of an operating system that knows how to read data from nvme devices.
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Jul 2 at 15:11
  • So then should I be able to load the windows boot manager from the HDD and then configure the boot manager to load the boot loader from the nvme drive (thus essentially booting windows from the nvme drive)? When I try this, I get "unable to find /Windows/system32/winload.efi", which I assume is because it hasn't properly initialised the disk yet for reading and writing.
    – Seamus Pitcher
    Commented Jul 4 at 6:10

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