m15 R1, NVMe support

Question

I have Alienware M15 (just regular one not R2 or R3) and it has two M.2 2280 slots. I also have large battery so 2.5" space is occupied.

I moved one SSD MX500 SATA 1TB (OS) from my other Dell laptop and put it in the first slot and the second slot has Intel 660p 2TB. Everything works.

Now I want to make another drive also 1TB but NVMe with OS and put it in the first slot. Manual says than the first slot supports SATA and NVMe. I also called and chatted with tech support and both said that is the configuration.

So I bought WD 750 1TB gaming drive Gen 3 and my laptop doesn't recognize it in the first slot. It is recognized in the second slot. I cloned MX 500 to the WD drive and installed it in the first slot but it is not recognized.

Even if I put new drive all by itself in the first slot still not recognized.

My warranty just expired. Basically Dell reps confirmed that the slot supports NVMe but it doesn't look like it.

Any ideas what to do?

Thanks.

ze3bar · Answer

have you changed the BIOS setting from RAID to AHCI?

jphughan · Answer

@Sushieater Fyi when saying that your laptop doesn't "recognize" an SSD, it's important to specify what test you're actually performing to determine that. If it was a boot test, there is a lot more that can prevent a successful boot than your laptop not recognizing an SSD. The basic test to determine whether your laptop recognizes an SSD at a hardware/firmware level is to go into your BIOS Setup and check your hardware inventory. If you see the SSD listed there, then M.2 slot support isn't your issue.

If you clone a Windows installation from a SATA device to an NVMe device on a system in AHCI mode, then it won't boot because the Windows environment you cloned will be configured to load a SATA driver at boot, not an NVMe driver, and it will not make that change dynamically. When Windows is first installed, it performs a full hardware enumeration and then records certain information about boot-critical hardware it discovered, and from that point on it simply assumes that that hardware will always be there. This allows Windows to boot more quickly going forward compared to performing a full hardware enumeration on every boot. (This full hardware enumeration is partly why the very first time Windows boots takes so long.) But that design of course means that if you CHANGE certain boot-critical hardware, Windows might not boot properly anymore because the assumptions will be wrong and therefore Windows will load an incorrect/incomplete driver set.

The paid version of Macrium Reflect has a feature called ReDeploy that is specifically designed to modify cloned/restored Windows environments in order to allow them to boot on different hardware. It specifically supports this scenario of moving from a SATA to NVMe SSD.

If you had your system in RAID mode, then that also would have avoided this issue because in that case Windows only ever has to load the Intel RST driver to interface with the Rapid Storage controller, and then the controller interfaces with the SSDs on the backend, so Windows doesn't have to worry about the physical storage interface.

Sushieater · Answer

It was already on AHCI. Actually I fixed the boot problem. Apparently cloning software (Macrium Reflect) did not install NVMe driver. So after I figured it out I booted in to Safe mode and ran SFC /SCANNOW in CMD and it fixed it. But not 100% sure if that was the problem so I am gong to buy another NVMe drive and do another cloning later.

Alienware

m15 R1, NVMe support

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