Windows 10: No iGPU on motherboard with newly replace M.2 blank SSD drive…how do I monitor install from...

I have a motherboard without an iGPU whose M.2 SSD boot drive has died, and now I have replaced the SSD with a new blank M.2 SSD, I also have made a USB Windows 10 boot disk, but can not figure a why to force the NVidia GPU to pass an image to my monitor, to view the reinstall of windows 10 from the USB flash drive, since motherboards has no iGPU…any ideas?

:)

 

How to properly swap out an M.2 SSD for a larger size replacement

I have an ASRock X399 Taichi, 128GB ram running Windows 10 Professional. This motherboard has 3 M.2 slots. I currently have a 960GB in M.2 slot 1 and it is my O/S drive. I another 960 GB in slot 2. It is my intention to replace the slot 1 M.2 with a 2TB
M.2. I then want to move the current 960 GB in slot 1 to slot 3. I want to make a fresh windows install on the 2TB and format the 960GB.

Will there be any issues with this? Previously I had a 480GB M.2 SSD in slot 2. I formatted it and removed it and replaced it with a 960GB but when I did this Windows could not find the boot drive (slot 1).

I don't mind doing a fresh install at all if that is the only solution.

 

replacing C: with larger M.2 NVme drive and move programs installed on D: to the new M.2 drive

I have a DELL Desktop Computer XPS XPS8920-7581SLV-PUS Intel Core i7 7th Gen 7700 desktop running Windows 10 Pro with the Toshiba 250 GB M.2 NVme drive as the C: drive and a 1TB hard disk as the D: drive. I have installed a couple of games and applications to the D: drive due to the size of the install files.

I am now planning to replace the Toshiba 250 GB M.2 drive with a Samsung 500 GB 970 EVO M.2 NVme drive.

The procedure I plan to use is to:

• clone the Toshiba drive to a new Western Digital SSD installed in a hard disk bay
  
• replace the Toshiba with the Samsung
  
• clone the new SSD back to the Samsung
  

At that point I should have a bootable C: on the Samsung NVme drive.

The next step would be to move the games and applications from the 1TB hard disk to the Samsung NVme drive since I now have the space for them.

However it is not really possible to just move installed applications due to all the Registry changes that would be needed.

The two applications are Visual Studio 2015 and 2017 (both Community Edition) and the games are World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, and Fallout 4 (the last being a Steam download).

So I am looking for advice on these changes.

Alternative approaches

It seems that I have a couple of options:

• clone the 1TB hard disk to the new SSD and just use the new SSD as D:
  
• uninstall the games and applications then reinstall them to the new C:
  
• create a D: partition on the new NVme drive and copy the installation folders there
  

The easiest approach would seem to be to clone the 1TB drive to the new SSD as D: and move on. However I would be missing out on the NVme goodness with the games as well as the Visual Studio programming environment.

The most straightforward approach would be to uninstall the games and applications from the 1TB hard disk and then reinstall them to the C: drive.

The applications are Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017, both Community Edition. These would both be straightforward to uninstall from D: and reinstall to C:.

The games are World of Warcraft and Destiny 2 from Blizzard and Fallout 4 from Steam. These games will require long download time probably two or three days over my internet access. And I would have to start Fallout 4 all over again.

Concluding thoughts

Perhaps the best option would be to combine the first two options.

Since the Visual Studio uninstall and install would be fairly painless I could do that while leaving the games on the 1TB drive and then do the clone of the 1TB drive to the new SSD. Then at a later date I could move World of Warcraft and Destiny 2 over to the NVme drive.

I would think that working with Visual Studio would be easier and quicker from the NVme C: drive while the games would be quick and responsive enough if the game assets are on an SSD.

 

Motherboard support for bootable M.2 NVME SSD

I have a Supermicro C7Q67 motherboard with 2 HDDs and 24GB Ram. I decided to find some hardware component(s) to improve the overall performance of this system. After some looking, I decided on a Vantec M.2 NVME PCIe X4 adapter and a 500GB M.2 NVME SSD to provide the performance boost. The M.2 SSD simply plugs into the adapter, which plugs into the X4 PCIe slot on the motherboard. I booted the system with the new hardware installed and then used Macrium to clone my Windows 10 (ver 2004) system onto the NVME SSD. The cloning completed successfully. After checking the SSD, I decided that it was time to check out how quickly the system would boot. I decided to disconnect the two HDDs before attempting the boot from the SSD. I pressed the power-on button and unfortunately the result was a blinking cursor - no Windows 10. So, I rebooted the PC and entered the Aptio Bios utility. I tabbed over to the 'Boot' tab and checked the Boot Options priority section and found no evidence that the new hardware was recognized. I checked the Hard Drives list - it contained a blank list. I know that the motherboard is fairly old (11 years), but because I was able to access the SSD to perform the cloning of Windows 10 onto the SSD previously, I thought that booting from the SSD would happen. Before the cloning, I did check the Device Manager and saw that a Standard NVM Controller was present under Storage Controllers and Windows Disk Management saw it as disk. So, under this computer platform, will I be able to use this SSD as a boot device ?