Windows 10: WIN 10 Residing on M.2 Drive - Other Programs

Hello,
I am new. This is my first post. I am not a heavyweight Win 10 person. I ordered all the parts to have a custom build. It is all Corsair/ASUS/ and AMD Ryzen 5 2600x CPU. The build was performed by Frys Electronics, stress tested and ready to use.

Before I turn it all on I would like some help clarifying the Following:

1. My WIN 10 HOME, Version 1909 resides on a Samsung m.2 drive (250Gb) on the motherboard.
Question - Do all programs have to reside on the m.2 drive? Can they reside on one of my SSD drives that I have on this system? I am having a real problem understanding all this. Rather confusing.

My current/old system has a Segate 2Tb Hybrid HD C: drive and everything resided on that drive including the Windows 7 O/S. I currently run Office 365 and a myriad of other programs, from authoring to some very very lite CAD and Adobe stuff.

I need Professional help here. I thank you for helping me. This forum is quite the place for WIN 10. Impressive.

:)

 

M.2 SSD not being able to boot from it, windows doesn't recognise.


Ok, this is what happened after all the comments and suggestions, @Dude: Thanx for the video, my mb had non e of those settings, it had the raid/option memory gene or achi. Can only choose one or the other. @Saltgrass, my settings did point out auto and enabled the pcie x4, gen 3. I did an bios flash as suggested, because my bios was not the latest version, after a reformat the m.2 was picked up, still cant install OS onto it as it states legacy not found, removed my dvd rom from the sata port to another, and the drive was found and installed. Only issue now is that it's still not my OS drive but it at least now works and is installed, but on the Intel rst drive the obtain memory gene option to enable is greyed out, and shows as disabled. However the program lists the M.2 and it is working 100%,. I installed overwhatch onto it, it performs perfectly. But will update the intel driver tonight and see if that makes any difference. Seems the bios flash enabled the settings listed by @Dude that was not present pre-flash.

So the m.2 drive works. I can game off it and install omnto it. Can not install windows on it, gene memmory is enabled, pcie x4 is on and on auto detect, Motherbaord lists all the drives connected, motherboard ahs been updated to latest bios. After flash new settings became available, m.2 is now on memmory gene enabled not achi, windows os is enabled and fast boost is enabled, intel rst is installed and lists all the ssds and the m.2, however the m.2 on memmory gene is dissabled and the option to enable is greyed out. Will update the driver as Essenbe suggested of the m.2 and see if anything changes. Thank you all for the help, I can now atleast use my m.2

 

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.

 

Windows is not recognizing an NVMe M.2 drive

Have Win 10Pro everything is fine except I can Not get a new NVMe M.2 to be recognized correctly by the OS it sees it as a SATA even though it is in a M.2 slot on Motherboard. I need more of an order of things to be done between the BIOS and Win 10. I
installed a Samsung 970 Pro 1 TB drive in a Z270X Gaming 7 MB and Win 10 has a problem and it sees it and formatted it as a Sata with only a little less than 500g of space???