@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.
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.
ze3bar
3 Posts
0
June 5th, 2020 20:00
have you changed the BIOS setting from RAID to AHCI?
jphughan
9 Legend
•
14K Posts
0
June 11th, 2020 10:00
@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
1 Rookie
•
21 Posts
0
June 11th, 2020 10:00
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.