Any way to force booting from PCI-e nvme card

bonehead123

bonehead123

[H]ard|Gawd
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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 :D
 
Unfortunately the bios wont allow. This came in with more modern mobos.

You can do SATA3 all day long.

I ran into this issue about 6 months ago..

Thank you,
 
I'm surprised you didn't experience a night and day difference between the old spinner and Sata 3 SSD. Depending on how old the machine is it may be held back by an IDE controller instead of the more modern (for the time) AHCI controller. See if the Bios has any Sata settings. Also check the device manager to see what type of controller is shown.
 
If moving from a HDD to SATA SSD did not make a substantial difference, I guarantee you that the NVMe SSD will not either.
The desktop is hideously CPU-bound with that anemic A10 APU, and the fastest disk drive in the world is not going to help that.

Unless the tasks themselves are solely disk intensive and not CPU intensive, then you are most likely not even going to notice the difference.
Also, nice work on getting that system working. (y)
 
bonehead123 said:
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 :D
Click to expand...
It depends on the adapter card itself. Most PCI-e to NVMe card adapters do not have a bootable BIOS at all, so there is absolutely no way at all whatsoever to boot from that card. If a given card had a bootable BIOS of its own, then that BIOS would have automatically loaded itself during system BIOS initialization.

In any case, you might as well suck it up and use only 5400 rpm spinners in that system: The performance of that 2-module/4-thread CPU is only about equal to that of a first-gen (Clarkdale) Intel i3 CPU.
 
SATA3 is plenty for that CPU. You don't need NVMe. I'm not sure you'd be able to tell the difference with that CPU.

If you happened to have an old Samsung 950 Pro, you could boot off of the card as the m.2 drive has the option ROM to support booting off of legacy systems. Other old NVMe drives have the OPROM also, but I only ever tried the 950 Pro.

I never tried Clover, but that's another option.
 
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