Can BIBM boot from an M.2 SATA SSD?

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CyberSimian
Posts: 137
Joined: Wed Aug 10, 2016 12:13 pm

Can BIBM boot from an M.2 SATA SSD?

Post by CyberSimian »

I recollect reading in a post a year or two ago that BIBM is not able reliably to boot from an M.2 NVME SSD. Prior to reading that post I had tried installing BIBM on a 128GB M.2 NVME SSD in a laptop, and indeed I found that it did not work reliably (it kept losing the configuration, if I remember correctly).

I am now in the situation where the HTPC that I am building has two M.2 sockets. One is exclusively NVME, but the other supports both NVME and SATA. So, if I purchased a SATA M.2 SSD and installed BIBM on it, would it work reliably?

It occurred to me that perhaps the M.2 nature of the SSD means that BIBM does not see it as a normal disk, even if it is SATA.

On the other hand, perhaps the motherboard BIOS makes the SSD appear exactly like a normal SATA disk, and BIBM cannot detect the difference. Does anyone know?

Thank you.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK
TeraByte Support
Posts: 3598
Joined: Thu May 05, 2011 10:37 pm

Re: Can BIBM boot from an M.2 SATA SSD?

Post by TeraByte Support »

Works fine on M.2 NVMe, always has. It's just another drive in the system the BIOS controls, BootIt doesn't care about the bus it's on. If you have a problem with drive order changing, then enable use boot item disk id option.
Brian K
Posts: 2214
Joined: Fri Aug 12, 2011 1:11 am
Location: NSW, Australia

Re: Can BIBM boot from an M.2 SATA SSD?

Post by Brian K »

I have NVMe PCIe M.2 drives on two computers. UEFI systems . BIU. No problems.
CyberSimian
Posts: 137
Joined: Wed Aug 10, 2016 12:13 pm

Re: Can BIBM boot from an M.2 SATA SSD?

Post by CyberSimian »

TeraByte Support wrote: Mon Feb 21, 2022 3:00 am Works fine on M.2 NVMe, always has. It's just another drive in the system the BIOS controls, BootIt doesn't care about the bus it's on. If you have a problem with drive order changing, then enable use boot item disk id option.
When I tried using BIBM on an NVME disk in my laptop, the failure might well have been caused by the drive order changing (this was about four years ago, and I no longer remember the details). My conclusion at the time was that the NVME disk was defective. I still have it, so I might try it in the new HTPC to see if it will work correctly using disk ids.

The puzzle that remains is that Windows requires a driver in order to access the NVME disk (to get Windows 7 to see the disk, I had to add the Samsung driver manually). So how come BIBM can access the disk without needing a special driver?
Brian K wrote: Mon Feb 21, 2022 6:16 am I have NVMe PCIe M.2 drives on two computers. UEFI systems . BIU. No problems.
Useful to know, but I don't anticipate using UEFI for quite a few years. :D

Thanks to both of you. :)

-- from CyberSimian in the UK
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