Dell T7910 won't boot from new NVME Drive

[My71455]

I have a T7910 with two E5-2690 v4 processors and 56 gig of RAM, Win10. I cloned the C drive (Samsung SSD 840EVO 500GB) to a Crucial P3 4TB NVMe drive in a PCIe adapter successfully, but I can't get it to boot to this drive. I've changed the boot order in the bios, even removed all other boot options, but it won't see it to boot from it. It's there in Windows when I boot from the original drive. It has the LSI 3008 controller, but it is not set up for RAID. Any suggestions? Thank you.

[stormsonweathers]

Have you used your windows boot disc or USB thumb drive to fix the boot error. Whenever you change mediums like that windows is still focused on the original medium that it was installed on. You will have to run a boot fix using the windows installer.

Also, are you booting via UEFI or legacy bios?

[My71455]

I am using legacy boot. I tried UEFI, but that didn't work either. I couldn't figure out how to add an entry in UEFI, and I saw in one of the videos you guys made that it works in either UEFI or legacy on this machine, so I gave up on trying that. I haven't used a boot disk, not sure how I can, it's not showing any errors, just not seeing the drive. If I use a boot disk, does it give me the option to choose which drive to boot from?
Thank you, Curt

[frankr2994]

Is it possible your original install was mbr legacy? Best of my knowledge you need to be in uefi to boot from nvme. If you installed a mbr partition style windows on to it. There will be no way to access it.
You can change mbr to gpt and set bios to uefi. But I'd really just recommend a fresh install to the nvme and pulling whatever files you need for your old drive.

[My71455]

Is "Jay Big Ticket 23" still around? He did a video about NVMe booting on this machine and made it work in Legacy, I would love to connect with him, is that possible? Video is from July 16 2018, Not sure about the "Jay Big Ticket 23", it's what shows in the transcript of the video. Thank you, Curt

[frankr2994]

Is "Jay Big Ticket 23" still around? He did a video about NVMe booting on this machine and made it work in Legacy, I would love to connect with him, is that possible? Video is from July 16 2018, Not sure about the "Jay Big Ticket 23", it's what shows in the transcript of the video. Thank you, Curt

Is there a specific reason you're using that machine with legacy bios? Nvme boot is natively supported with that PC.

[My71455]

I can't get it to boot to the NVMe drive no matter what I do, I'm clearly missing something. I've cloned my C to the new dive, changed the boot order to use the new drive before the current C, removed the current C physically, removed it from the boot sequence, etc.

[frankr2994]

I can't get it to boot to the NVMe drive no matter what I do, I'm clearly missing something. I've cloned my C to the new dive, changed the boot order to use the new drive before the current C, removed the current C physically, removed it from the boot sequence, etc.

Sounds like your original install was done with legacy bios and you cloned it over.
If nvme can be used with legacy it still shouldn't. You should only use UEFI unless you have to run an OS or hardware that requires legacy.

Something else to look at when cloning boot drives (I hate doing for reasons like this) is that the bios default for Sata settings are raid. So your original install would be set to raid when ahci is actually what's needed.