NVMe SSD not recognized by the motherboard

[mirh]

If you need an active partition for the thing to work, then you are most definitively booting with BIOS/MBR (or is it possible for such a bug to still linger after a decade?)

Anyway, I just checked the Z370AG5 bios with uefitool and I see no nvme reference.
I wonder if gigabyte itself isn't relying on a legacy BIOS option rom (which you aren't clearly using since CSM is disabled), but your plextor SSD has an UEFI one that even though not being accepted by the setup GUI, eventually works when it's time to matter.
Intel also has some very.. diversified guidance across vendors.

 

[nguyen]

If you need an active partition for the thing to work, then you are most definitively booting with BIOS/MBR (or is it possible for such a bug to still linger after a decade?)

Anyway, I just checked the Z370AG5 bios with uefitool and I see no nvme reference.
I wonder if gigabyte itself isn't relying on a legacy BIOS option rom (which you aren't clearly using since CSM is disabled), but your plextor SSD has an UEFI one that even though not being accepted by the setup GUI, eventually works when it's time to matter.
Intel also has some very.. diversified guidance across vendors.

Well if I remember right, I used Rufus to put the win10 installation onto an USB. In Rufus, set the partition scheme to GPT and Target system to UEFI. Only then can the Win10 installation recognize the NVME drive.
The PC has been working flawlessly so I don't want to mess around with the booting sequence.
From your link seems like some NVME drives just want to avoid detection by UEFI BIOS , so it may not be motherboard's related.

 

[jlewis02]

I had to enable CSM to see the drives in the bios.

 

[Mussels]

I may be wrong, but dont NVME drives only show up once they have a UEFI system installed to them, AKA windows?

CSM let you choose a drive directly, but UEFI you have to choose the OS, yes?

 

[mirh]

BIOS booting lets you choose specific disks (and well, only that) because it cannot really be any more smart about it.
UEFI also supports some kind of firmware-based boot manager, but it too has a hardcoded path in the ESP partition that it will always try to look for (which I reckon it's what it uses when you boot from a just-inserted USB key). If it doesn't find them though it won't populate the boot selection menu.

Nvme as a protocol has nothing to do with UEFI then, if not for the very tentative half-assed explanation I tried to provide above about option ROMs.

 

[Miguel2013]

boot with a dvd usb or with a bootable windows 10 installation disk and see if it can see your nvme disk and it is ready to install windows 10, I think it will show, you said it doesn't show on windows disk managment but look again it may not been initialized or have any partitions or something so you can't see it right away, also load latest ubuntu from another pen drive and see if the app disks sees it. The NVME u have looks plug and play, check uefi settings again as a last resort but this is beyond what I know.

 

[hornirl]

Not sure whether you're still trying on this, but I'm also looking for solutions to getting a Win 10 bootable NVME drive up on an old mobo, in my case an ASUS H87M-PRO. It seems easier to get the NVME working to just hold data, it's the boot NVME that's the real devil. Try here or this search. If you get it working before me, please let me know... Tx.

 

[Mussels]

Not sure whether you're still trying on this, but I'm also looking for solutions to getting a Win 10 bootable NVME drive up on an old mobo, in my case an ASUS H87M-PRO. It seems easier to get the NVME working to just hold data, it's the boot NVME that's the real devil. Try here or this search. If you get it working before me, please let me know... Tx.

My dad has his system booting on my old 4770k on NVME, so its not an age thing.

You know that you need to set the BIOS to UEFI boot, and install windows to a GPT partition? (when you make USB installers, they can copy the existing MBR setup and then wont install or boot - you need the original DVD, or to make a bootable USB from ISO with RUFUS and specify GPT)

 

[hornirl]

My dad has his system booting on my old 4770k on NVME, so its not an age thing.

You know that you need to set the BIOS to UEFI boot, and install windows to a GPT partition? (when you make USB installers, they can copy the existing MBR setup and then wont install or boot - you need the original DVD, or to make a bootable USB from ISO with RUFUS and specify GPT)

Thanks for this, though my thanks a little belated. Turned out the problem wasn't the MOBO itself, rather the BIOS needed modifying to insert code to support a bootable NVME drive (it had no trouble recognizing one for just data post-boot via another type of drive (SSD/HDD)). Solution was here in case others come looking.

If you're lucky you can also find a modded BIOS for your MOBO already available here too, or do the modding/reflashing yourself- I didn't find it that difficult.