Windows 10: Help with NVME boot issues

Installed WIn 10 Pro 64 EUFI successfully onto a 1TB NVMe drive and all was working fine and reliably. Without going into much detail, was trying to get a UAD accelerator PCe2 card working on the system (these are used in pro audio and there are known issues with Ryzen systems). Silly me started to mess with PCe by changing to earlier protocols in BIOS, trying to get the UAD card recognised. I actually had it working in the graphics slot but problems began when I installed a graphics card so that I could upgrade the CPU (to a non graphic capable Ryzen 5 3600). Obviously these attempts (which all failed by the way) also upset the NVMe settings and now the system will not boot. I took an Acronis disk image of the NVMe drive and found that all the data is still there - it's just that for some reason the Windows Boot Manager won't work and even if I set just the drive (without the Windows Boot Manager) as the boot drive I get the message to insert proper boot media.

Funnily enough (actually it wasn't funny) at the same time I built another system for someone using EUFI and a NVMe drive. That system worked fine until Windows Build 1909 got installed and when that system rebooted it too could not see the NVMe boot drive. Again, an Acronis disk image was taken and I found that all the data of the original Windows installation was still there. I restored to a SATA SSD but alas I could not get the system to boot from that new SSD either. I began to wonder whether there was an issue with EUFI and NVMe drives. At any rate I did a normal (non EUFI ) install on that system using the SATA SSD as the boot drive and just used the NVME drive as a data drive.

Both NVMe drives in these two systems were Crucial P1 1TB drives.

If anyone has hung in there so far and read all this - is there anyway I can recover my system so that it boots from the NVMe drive again? I can install the drive in another system so I will be able to edit or otherwise manipulate it outside of the problematic system if necessary.

Thanks

:)

 

Windows 10 installer don't detect NVMe drive

I have 2 drives:

• disk1 (SATA SSD, with Ubuntu 16.04)
  • partition1 (sda1: flag /boot)
  • partition2 (sda2: flag /home, encrypted by LUKS)
• disk2 (NVMe SSD)

So, the goal is to install Windows 10 on disk2 and boot it from GRUB (which is on sda1).

What is the problem ?

In disk-choose step, disk2 is missing. However Ubuntu 14.04 installer "see" this disk, so I assume that is software issue, rather than my hardware.

What I tried to solve this problem ?

• loaded Samsung NVMe drivers from this thread
• patched Windows image using DISM tool by adding 2 updates. I followed this guide
• tried to run Windows 10 installed on USB stick to install it

All of them failed.

Please help me to solve this issue.

 

AMD X370 Chipset - NVMe boot device - Driver issue

Mostly posting this in case others run into this issue.

I have an AMD Ryzen system with an Asus X370 motherboard and two SATA drives in a RAID 1 array booting from a Western Digital NVMe stick

Last night at some point the system - Newly upgraded to Windows 1903 with all available post upgrade patches - that the
Standard NVM Express Controller driver wasn't sufficient for the NVMe stick not running RAID mode (disabled in BIOS) and installed the
AMD-RAID Bottom Device and AMD-RAID Controller [Storport] drivers for it.

It did this silently. I rebooted to cure a different issue and Windows 10 ended up in a boot loop.

I only realized what actually happened after I restored a Macrium Reflect (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) image of the C: drive (NVMe) from the night before the reboot, opened device manager and saw what it had done.

I don't know of an easy way to figure out which AMD-RAID Bottom Device
and AMD-RAID-Controller [Storport] are assigned to which device so I temporarily put the NMVe stick into RAID mode so it would boot and disabled RAID for the remainder of the SATA devices. This let me boot, change the driver back to the
Standard NVM Express Controller Driver (because now there is only one AMD-RAID Bottom Device and AMD-RAID-Controller [Storport]
listed in device manager) , disable NVMe RAID, enable SATA RAID and resolve the issue.

Whew. Now, if it boot loops again, my first troubleshooting step will be to turn on RAID mode for the NVMe stick and see if that fixes the boot issue... Instead of spending an hour trying to get the system to see the F8 key being spammed so I could select
the Reflect recovery USB stick and reimage the NMVe stick...

 

Use bootloader from a SATA disk to boot Windows installation on a NVME disk

I've managed to get the system booting from the NVME some other way:

1. Converted the NVME to GPT using MBR2GPT.EXE
2. Hacked NVME support into the bios