M.2 NVME as boot drive Optiplex 7020

These machines were built before PCI-E drives went mainstream therefore the BIOS never got support to boot off PCI-E devices. 

So what this means is the BIOS does not support Booting off PCI-E.Only SATA devices

I am not at all aware of a workaround at this moment.

@SMACK64 , I had posted a response to your inquiry with detail instruction and I just want to see if it works for you but strange thing had happened, my post disappeared.  It seems that it was censored because it is contradicting to others responses from experts in here that it couldn't be done.

The answer to your inquiry is NO, the 7020 can't boot from NVME because the BIOS doesn't support it as indicated by elpro999dell response.  But there are work around methods, the simplest one is to create a boot disk (USB) using REFIND, DUET, or CLOVER. 

Several posts in this community have mentioned work around methods.  However, no detail instruction as the one I responded to you (now gone), search around, hopefully it will work for you.

Chino,

Hi @SMACK64 ,

I have just done this to my own OptiPlex 7020 via a BIOS modification and it works really well. I was able to significantly boost the performance of the machine. This is the speed I am getting from my Samsung SSD:

Which I think is really impressive for a machine made in 2015.

I've written up a guide on How to Modify the BIOS of the OptiPlex 7020 to support booting from NVMe drive on my blog here. Please let me know how you get on if you decide to try it.

I have also same problem, I have initialized the drive as Master Boot Record NTFS, and I even copied an image of my regular drive into it. But I can’t get the computer to use it as the boot drive. When I unplug my previous drive and try to boot it says “Hard Drive Not Found.” I tried to find it in the BIOS and even updated the BIOS firmware, but no dice. 

Kindly give solution using Bios Update, I am welly known that only Bios update can resolve the this issue. Kindly resolve.

This is a problem common to older machines, the bios will not recognize the nvme as a boot device. The easiest solution is a modified bootloader such as clover with the nvme drivers on it. It must be in your computer upon boot, and your bios must be set to boot to that first, either cd, dvd, or usb with the modified clover on it. Works perfect. There are guys selling usb sticks on ebay preloaded with everything you need.