Making an old machine boot from a pcie nvme card

[bonehead123]

Hello there,

I have recently come across an old HP/AMD A10-powered business machine, which is horribly slow and I wanna speed it up....but I don't see any options in the bios to get it to boot from a pcie card with an nvme drive on it..

Can this be done perhaps with a custom bios ? If so please let me know if you have any ideas how/where I could obtain the tools needed to accomplish this...

And FYI, I have already replaced the spinning ruster buster with a 512GB SATA3 SSD, which helped a little, as did bumping the ram from 4 to 16GB, and installing a new but very slimmed down/optimized W10 pro install....and only the bare minimum apps so far...

The only other thing I thought of might be to install a small d-GPU like a 2-4GB GT1030 or 1050, in order to offload some of the graphics rendering from the cpu & integrated gpu, which has only 1GB of vram...

TIA for any suggestions

 

[stinger608]

Hmm, now I wonder if you actually installed the PCIe card and SSD, if it would appear in the BIOS as a bootable possibility?

If you have both the card and NVMe, you might poke it in there and see if it shows as an option in the BIOS.

Just a thought?

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Hello there,

I have recently come across an old HP/AMD A10-powered business machine, which is horribly slow and I wanna speed it up....but I don't see any options in the bios to get it to boot from a pcie card with an nvme drive on it..

Can this be done perhaps with a custom bios ? If so please let me know if you have any ideas how/where I could obtain the tools needed to accomplish this...

And FYI, I have already replaced the spinning ruster buster with a 512GB SATA3 SSD, which helped a little, as did bumping the ram from 4 to 16GB, and installing a new but very slimmed down/optimized W10 pro install....and only the bare minimum apps so far...

The only other thing I thought of might be to install a small d-GPU like a 2-4GB GT1030 or 1050, in order to offload some of the graphics rendering from the cpu & integrated gpu, which has only 1GB of vram...

TIA for any suggestions

I can't say it's definitely going to work but I did use a pciex drive on an FX system that didn't directly support it and it was a pain to get working and that had a controller built in so I could load driver's during windows install and get it working, I doubt a nvme+adapter would be bootable directly but it might well show up during install of Windows and if it does should then boot, it's a pciex drive after all and I have tried a basic adapter.
I wouldn't bet on it still so I wouldn't advise spending much to try it.

 

[68Olds]

Can you run CrystalDiskMark then post a screenshot of the benchmark. The SSD in AHCI mode made a pretty big difference with my A10 APU. I am running a separate video card though. It's an old HD7750 video card.
Edit: my motherboard is only SATAII but the SSD is SATAIII.

Here's my CDM result to give you something to compare against.

 

[docnorth]

I don’t think you can expect any improvement compared to sata iii ssd. Even if you manage to connect a NVMe drive via adapter the maximum transfer speed will probably still be sata iii. The idea to use a dGPU seems far better, the CPU has a fixed power limit on prebuilt systems, that is shared with the integrated graphics if they are used.

 

[stinger608]

I don’t think you can expect any improvement compared to sata iii ssd. Even if you manage to connect a NVMe drive via adapter the maximum transfer speed will probably still be sata iii.

Yep, I think you are correct on this mate!

 

[68Olds]

I don’t think you can expect any improvement compared to sata iii ssd. Even if you manage to connect a NVMe drive via adapter the maximum transfer speed will probably still be sata iii. The idea to use a dGPU seems far better, the CPU has a fixed power limit on prebuilt systems, that is shared with the integrated graphics if they are used.

Yep, I think you are correct on this mate!

I agree and SATAIII will be better than SATAII if the add-in card can boot the system. I'm curious to see if the OP is running the SSD in IDE mode or AHCI mode. If it's in IDE mode, it will barely be faster than a spinner.

 

[Wirko]

I don’t think you can expect any improvement compared to sata iii ssd. Even if you manage to connect a NVMe drive via adapter the maximum transfer speed will probably still be sata iii.

I agree. I have a SATA III SSD (Samsung 850 EVO in AHCI mode) in my main PC (i5-6600K) and no, the SSD is not dragging the PC down to the point that I'd even consider a NVMe drive. Your A10 processor is about half as fast as my i5, and the SSD is roughly equally fast, so again, the SSD is not even close to being a bottleneck.

If the CPU is on the AM4 socket then you have some options to upgrade it; if it's FM2/FM2+, you already have what's the fastest, or very close to that.

The idea to use a dGPU seems far better, the CPU has a fixed power limit on prebuilt systems, that is shared with the integrated graphics if they are used.

True, and apart from that, the CPU has a fixed memory bandwidth that's shared with the iGPU if it's enabled.

 

[thewan]

you could always try a bootloader/manager like clover. basically you put clover onto a sata drive or a usb drive and boot from it, clover recognizes the pcie nvme ssd and you can select it to boot. For installing windows, if you boot directly from usb and windows cannot see the pcie nvme ssd, try booting into clover first then use clover to boot the windows installer. it should see the pcie nvme ssd for installation.
(I have never tried this as I didnt need to, so you would need to ask someone else for additional help if necessary)

GitHub - CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader: Bootloader for macOS, Windows and Linux in UEFI and in legacy mode

Bootloader for macOS, Windows and Linux in UEFI and in legacy mode - CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader

github.com

I did have an Bulldozer AMD FX system with a second hand Crosshair V Formula Z in it (No way i could afford this brand new back when I was a student, but my previous mobo died after getting killed by a leaking AIO and it was cheap). There was already a premoded bios for that mobo to boot using pcie nvme ssd from the wonderful ppl over at win-raid which I could just flash and it works just like that. Maybe you can hit up that forum and make a request for your bios or ask for help on how to mod your own bios. If you ask some one to do it you might need to pay them though.

Win-Raid Forum

Guides, Drivers, Firmware, Research & Discussions regarding Computer Storage, BIOS/Firmware Modding, System Performance, Optimization etc

winraid.level1techs.com

BIOS/UEFI Modding

Guides, Files and Support

winraid.level1techs.com

 

[bonehead123]

Thanks to everyone who has responded

1- Yes I have already installed the card with the nvme drive on it and it does not show up in device manager, disk management, bios, or anywhere else for that matter
2- Yes I have the SATA mode set to AHCI, not IDE...
3- It's on the FM2+ socket, I know because it originally had an A6 in there, and I researched my upgrade possibilities & bought the A10 to replace it, dropped it in & booted right up nottaproblemo, but that's as far as this mobo can go CPU-wise

So next I think I will look into the Clover option, and then perhaps the dGPU...

I will post back with the results !

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

RAID 10 boot SSD?

 

[OneMoar]

an nvme drive is not going to help that pc, a SATA drive is all the drive that machine needs (it doesn't have the pci-e bandwidth anyway if you plan on putting anything else in the system)

the issue is the AMD APU AMD APUs even the A10s where in short garbage, the best thing you can do for them is fast ram
but the entire machine is likely worth about 50 bucks

putting a dGPU in there is silly unless there is some specific game you are trying to play, but any modern gpu even a GTX 1060 would be wasted on that machine
best just to bin it and surf facebook/goodwill for something newer

 

[uuee]

For everyday tasks I cannot tell the difference between a sata2 ssd as the bootdrive (Intel 710) and an NVME pcie3.0 (Patriot Viper VPN) in my i7-10700 rig.

Sell the NVME drive and buy a used 1155 board + an i5 3xxx from that money (or sg like a dell 7010 mt -Could be bought for 50-60 EUR where I live). It will be night and day compared to an A10 powered machine.

Off topic: An SSD in IDE mode wouldn't be much slower than in AHCI, not even compareable to a HDD.

 

[bonehead123]

Well, 1st off, I did not BUY this machine, it was taken out of storage at work to be thrown into the trash bin, so it's not like it's a budget buster for me to spend $100 or so to see if I can make it moderately usable, even just as a surfer box or whatever, and I already had the m.2 drive as one of my spares with some 3rd copy of my regular back-ups

Also, I build (professionally), rebuild, restore etc pc's, new, old or in between....don't matta to me, so this is moar of the same, not anything that is so critical that I just can't do without it, seeins how I have several other modern W10 & 11 machines in da house

Yes I know the A10 wasn't exactly da bomb, but it still works, and I got it for free also, so no biggie there either !

As for the GPU, as I said before, I thought perhaps that offloading some of the graphics work from the cpu & iGPU with its pitiful 1GB of vram might help a little, but again it's not critical, so I may skip that too.

CDM results are too scary to post, as it only got into the mid-100's for the seq #'s & 1/2 that on the random readings....so any improvement here would be a welcomed change for sure, even if it only gets similar what to the above screenshot shows....

 

[OneMoar]

the low disk mark scores are because the cpu is slow
so nvme storage is not going to fix that

 

[bonehead123]

the low disk mark scores are because the cpu is slow
so nvme storage is not going to fix that

Yea I know, I was just trying whatever I could to help things along as far as I could.... I would hate to see how low the scores would have been with the original A6

 

[Vario]

If you want to boot from an NVMe on an older system, the Samsung 950 Pro will do it. It has a setting that allows you to boot in Legacy Mode. There aren't very many other SSD that will. You pretty much need a Samsung 950 Pro or it won't work. I have a 950 Pro and I am able to boot to Windows with my 2010 X58 Xeon system.

 

[68Olds]

My system is FM2, not FM2+. PM me if you wanna compare settings. It’s great for a htpc at these less than optimal specs.

 

[LabRat 891]

Watching thread. Will revisit later.

(I've successfully booted off nVME using a 3rd party bootloader, on H81 w/o UEFI support) I'm looking to do this again on some seriously retro kit in the near future. Will both reference here, and share when I do.