XPS 15 9550, doesn't recognize 970 EVO

Hi

I'm looking into web just now because I would like to do the same of you on my XPS 15 9550

My only concern is: maybe XPS 15 (9550) do not accept 970? (and you require 9560 9570?)

For sure 9550 accept 960 as you can find here (https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops-General-Read-Only/XPS-15-9550-NMVe-PCIe-Samsung-960-Pro-compatible/td-p/5173515)

but 9550 has different configuration compared to 9560 (look here https://laptopmedia.com/laptop-m-2-ngff-ssd-compatibility-list/)

I hope someone could help us!

Try to switch from "minimal" to complete hardware check at the startup in the BIOS. I had a problem with the intel 9260 not being activated by the system and I solved in this way. Maybe you can solve it as I did...

I'm confused when you say you can't get your system to "recognize" the 970 Evo even though you were able to clone your original SSD onto it.  Unless you used another system to perform that clone, then if your 9550 was able to clone to the 970, that means it recognized it.  If you're having trouble booting a cloned installation, that's another matter.  Often it helps to disconnect the source disk the first time you try to boot from a clone, and some cloning tools like Macrium Reflect even have a "Fix Boot Problems" routine to help with situations like this because booting after a clone can be tricky sometimes, especially with UEFI-based systems.

The drive is recognized when it is in a USB to M2. Adapter.

When I remove the original drive from the motherboard and replace it with the new drive, it is not recognized. 

When I boot the laptop, I get taken to the diag screen and informed there is no bootable device.

Interesting, nice to see there are finally NVMe to USB adapters on the market. There weren’t when I last checked. Now if they could just make one that supports both M.2 SATA and M.2 NVMe SSDs rather than only one or the other.

Weird that your previous SSD didn’t show up under System Information because I think it should. As one last idea just to rule out possible issues with the adapter, if you have a separate external hard drive (or large flash drive), try capturing an image of your existing SSD to a file, installing your new SSD internally, and restoring the image onto it that way. Your imaging software should have a way to create bootable media to accomplish this. I admit this idea is a long shot, but I’m thinking of past cases where some external hard drive enclosures claimed to support drives larger than 2TB even on WinXP, and they did that by incorrectly reporting the drive’s physical sector configuration. That worked, but it meant that if you ever tried to read that drive from an internal SATA port (or an enclosure that didn’t lie about the sector type), the data was unreadable.

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@mhsimkin wrote:

The drive is recognized when it is in a USB to M2. Adapter.

When I remove the original drive from the motherboard and replace it with the new drive, it is not recognized. 

When I boot the laptop, I get taken to the diag screen and informed there is no bootable device.

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Can you post a link to the specific USB to M.2 adapter you're using that works with the 970 Evo?  Also, try going into the BIOS while the SSD is installed internally and check the top section, I believe called "System Information" and see if it's recognized there.  If it is, then the device isn't bootable because of something involving your cloning process, not because the system doesn't work with it.

Hi.  I just wanted to provide an update.

I think the issue is related to sector size.  The original factory SSD has a sector size of 512.

When I place the 970 EVO in the USB adapter is shows a sector size of 4096.  Whether the USB Adapter is reporting that, or the 970 does actually have a 4096 sector size I don't know.

I'm going to have to do a full drive back up to an external HD/SSD and then a restore to the 970.

I will let you know how things go.

Thanks for all the help.

-marc

i got same issue with Dell G5 5587 , i installed evo 970 500gb instead of original 128gb.

after installing win10 on Evo970 then it disappeared from bios view and i can't recognize it again!

i don't know what to do to see it again ?

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@mhsimkin wrote:

Hi.  I just wanted to provide an update.

I think the issue is related to sector size.  The original factory SSD has a sector size of 512.

When I place the 970 EVO in the USB adapter is shows a sector size of 4096.  Whether the USB Adapter is reporting that, or the 970 does actually have a 4096 sector size I don't know.

I'm going to have to do a full drive back up to an external HD/SSD and then a restore to the 970.

I will let you know how things go.

Thanks for all the help.

-marc

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It's crucial to confirm that your USB enclosure is not deliberately reporting a different sector size than the drive actually uses (that probably is NOT happening in this particular case), but moving from a 512-byte sector size drive to a 4K drive may well be the problem.  Macrium Reflect for example explicitly says that it doesn't support this.  However, the only drives on the market that I'm aware of that use true "4K native" or 4Kn setups are enterprise drives.  Other drives that use 4K sectors at a hardware level still emulate 512-byte sectors for compatibility; they are called "512e" drives.  You can check this by running the command "fsutil fsinfo sectorinfo X:", replacing X with the desired drive letter.  Here is the relevant output from my own SSD from that command:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>fsutil fsinfo sectorinfo c:
LogicalBytesPerSector :                                 512
PhysicalBytesPerSectorForAtomicity :                    4096
PhysicalBytesPerSectorForPerformance :                  4096
FileSystemEffectivePhysicalBytesPerSectorForAtomicity : 4096

As long as the LogicalBytesPerSector field is 512 on both your source and destination drives, cloning and image restores should work.

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@beboegy wrote:

i got same issue with Dell G5 5587 , i installed evo 970 500gb instead of original 128gb.

after installing win10 on Evo970 then it disappeared from bios view and i can't recognize it again!

i don't know what to do to see it again ?

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Which BIOS view are you looking at?  The top section in the list along the left should be "System Information/Summary".  If you select that and check the hardware info on the right, is the SSD listed there in the M.2/NVMe section?  If you were able to install Windows 10 onto it, then it doesn't make sense that it would suddenly completely disappear at a hardware level.  If the issue is that you're trying to boot from it and that's not working, then the install routine may not have registered the bootloader on the SSD into the UEFI firmware properly, especially if you had the previous 128GB drive still installed when you were setting up the Evo 970.

I just wanted to provide an update.  My apologies for taking so long.

I was never able to get the 970 to work.  I had gotten to a point where I was going to try a full clean install.  However, before I was able to do that, I ended up purchasing a new laptop and giving my XPS to my father.  His 8+ year old Inspirion finally decided to "retire" this past Friday.

Thank you everyone for all the help.

-marc

Been having the same issue unfortunately with brand new Dell XPS 9570.

I'm wondering what's up with the BIOS versions that comes from the manufacture, how come it's so complicated which kind of makes me want to return this computer to the seller as sad as it is.

Note that the BIOS version that came from the manufacture with that XPS is 1.3.0, but in the website I saw there is 1.4.1 and 1.5.0 available but as far as I checked what they fixed, it looks like it has nothing to do with the boot devices:

1.5.0 Fixes:
- Updated Intel ME Firmware to address security advisories INTEL-SA-00125 (CVE-2018-3655), Intel-SA-00141 (CVE-2018-3657, CVE-2018-3658 and CVE-2018-3616) and Intel-SA-00131 (CVE-2018-3643 and CVE-2018-3644).
- Improved sleep mode power management in Ubuntu.
- Solved the intermittent issue where the system powers off from hibernation after adapter is plugged or unplugged.
- Fixed the issue with touch screen where it malfunctions after closing and opening the lid.
- Fixed the issue with missing characters while typing when system is in idle mode. 

1.4.1 Fixes:
1. Fixed an issue that some systems show incorrect VGA name in BIOS setup 
2. Corrected the touch screen disable behavior in BIOS setup
3. Fixed a potential system hang issue when an incorrectly formatted password is entered at the BIOS Security Manager (BIOS pre-boot password) prompt
4. Fixed a potential issue with binary image measurement using the Linux UEFI shim boot loader

I should start a new topic about this, but I though it's would also be good to update here. 

I tried any kind of setup configuration in the BIOS and got to the point where the SSD is detected, but cannot be seen in UEFI. When I install fresh windows install on the SSD, everything looks fine during the installation process until it finishes and trying to boot to windows and than it says no boot device detected.

In the BIOS System Information I can see the SN key of the Samsung 970 Pro SSD detected, which means it's being detected, but in if I change to UEFI, it won't be visible, only in Legacy which kind of sad, but even in Legacy it won't find the boot device after installing fresh windows. I also tried using boot correctors with Paragonbackup which basically does all the work of running bcdedit commands in the background to correct the boot partition. 

At this point I'm running out of options and considering cloning the manufacture drive to the Samsung 970 Pro SSD as is and see how it goes.

Did you switch drive operation from RAID to AHCI in UEFI? My lattitude 5491 did not recognized the drive first, bt after setting this option it did.