Has anyone been able to boot from an NVME drive on a non-UEFI motherboard?

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nelsona

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Feb 12, 2017
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Hello,

I was looking at purchasing a Samsung 960 Pro (or 950 Pro) for my old LGA 1366 socket system.

I was told by certain people that the 960 Pro supported legacy BIOS'.

However, when asking a well known SSD retailer, they mentioned that I'd be unable to booth from a M.2 NVME drive, like a Samsung 960 Pro (or 950 Pro or SM951).

I just wanted to check to see if anyone had any success booting on a LGA 1366 / Windows 7 Professional box (without performing any crazy hacks)?

If not, I'll just go with an 850 Pro.

Thank you,
Nelson
 
Not worth the hassle IMO. You are getting into using a modified bios in order to get it to read for boot.
 
Mixing the old with the new doesnt always work. Its a very safe bet to say its not worth the tome and effort.

If you have the need and can use the benefits of a nvme , you would benefit more from a new system.
 
Instead of messing with the BIOS I am more interested in seeing GRUB installed on a USB stick selecting a NVMe drive as the boot. I believe as long as GRUB can see the NVMe drive (and you can get your OS to install in the NVMe drive) this should work even without BIOS support.
 
Thank you everyone for the input.

It looks like unless I'm willing to re-install my OS (which for now I'm not), that I won't be able to simply copy my current OS installation using Samsung's Magician software and boot from a NVME drive.

Keep in mind that I was planning on purchasing the 960 Pro so that when I did in fact upgrade to a new system, I would already have a blazing fast drive.

That said, given that I don't play games (and just use my system for editing music), storage space and RAM are more important to me than CPU / GPU performance.

Thank you all for the help,
Nelson
 
I just went through this with a system that's a bit newer than yours. I have an HP Z230 workstation (i7-4770). It does have UEFI, but does not support NVME booting. What you're looking for is an SSD which has the necessary OPROM to support booting. As far as I can tell, the only one is the 950 PRO (The OEM 951 doesn't seem to). The 950 PRO whitepaper goes into some detail (page 19), but it's not clear if it is a UEFI only deal or if it supports legacy BIOS booting as well.

http://www.samsung.com/semiconducto.../document/Samsung_SSD_950_PRO_White_paper.pdf

If you Google "950 pro oprom" you'll find a number of success stories regarding booting on older hardware.

Good luck!

Riley
 
Seems like a lot of hassle and no guarantees. No one has responded yes yet.
 
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