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Image from SSD to NVME Bluescreen

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Just wondering if anyone else has figured this out.

I am Imaging from a Dell tower with an SSD to a similar model (but newer) with an NVME M.2

I got the latest beta from here on the forums and everythign is detected and the image goes off without a hitch. After the image i get a bluescreen on boot. Running Windows 7, which dell does say works on this model. Made sure my windows on the master has the NVME hotfix, installed every ssd and drive driver i could find. Went on dells site and found a link to an intel nvme driver which i tried telling acronis to install during imaging. All still to no avail.

 

Went into the bios and switched to "raid on" for ssd (even though this is an nvme) and that at least lets me into windows recovery, with the bios set to ahci even the windows recovery would bluescreen.   Tried setting drives to "disabled" and only turning on the nvme and no change there.

 

Has anyone else successfully gone from a ssd (or mechanical even) to an NVME M.2?

I see some posts about it but they all mention injecting a samsung driver, and i have a toshiba nvme drive which i'm not seeing a specific driver for, as this looks to be an oem style device and not an off the shelf one.

Saw sine users saying you need to use UEFI for booting off nvme, but is that true? I get 1/2 way before i bluescreen on BIOS setting.  If that is true, i'm not sure how i would do it, as when i choose boot UEFI it shows no boot option, when i click "add" it tells me nothing is found.

 

Any other ideas would be appreciated, we bought a few of these and i'm running out of ideas! 

Thanks

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Hi rja2,

Yes, I imaged from my Samsung EVO 850 to my Samsung 950Pro and it worked out of the box - I was using SATA mode set as AHCI though as I am not using RAID.  Typcially, if you switch SATA modes, you have to prep the OS (while Windows is booted first).  You can do this with the Microsoft fix it tool:  

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/922976

Also, what model is your Dell tower and what is the firmware revision on it? 

Yes, to be able to boot with an NVME drive, you must be using UEFI.  You can use them in a legacy/bios system, but only as a data drive and not a boot OS. A lot of forums will tell you to mount the NVME drive as a second drive in your current setup.  This will allow you to install drivers and make sure the OS detects it.  If it does, you have the necessary drvers.  However, if you then try to restore an image to it and it's not booting, it's usually because the system is a legacy/MBR build.  

IF you currently have a legacy OS, I know you can boot the offline recovery media in True Image Home 2016 in UEFI mode and it will convert the MBR format to UEFI/GPT in the process.  I've not actually tried to do that with Snap Deploy though.  However, you could test by making sure the dell is set to UEFI only, boot to your offline recovery and see what happens. Perhaps grab minitool parition wizard mini and make a bootable drive with it so that you can check the parition scheme easily if it is not booting aftwerards to see if it did convert to GPT/EFI or still resulted in a MBR recovery.

https://tinkertry.com/how-to-boot-win10-from-samsung-950-pro-nvme-on-su…

Requirements

Whatever NVMe drive you buy, you'll still likely need to meet all of the following requirements, if you plan to also use it as a boot device:

  • a newer system, such as the Xeon D-1540 or Skylake chipsets (2015 or later)
  • modern OSs have the NVMe driver built-in, like Windows 8.1/10 or Windows Server 2016 (the Microsoft NVMe driver is generally slower, replace it with vendor provided driver once Windows is installed)
  • a UEFI BIOS that supports boot from NVMe (not something you can assume)
    (on this system's X10SDV-TLN4F motherboard, BIOS 1.0a or 1.0b both allow boot from NVMe)
  • an M.2 PCI-E x4 slot (as in 4 lanes, key to obtaining the maximum speeds)
  • BIOS in UEFI boot mode (nice bonus is that it allows your bootable device to be larger than 2TB, since Windows will use GPT rather than legacy MBR)
  • some mobos also require CSM (Compatibility Support Mode) be turned on, read ASRock example here, this Supermicro mobo has CSM Enabled by default
  • a willingness to do any required BIOS upgrades and/or BIOS configuration changes (varies by motherboard manufacturer)

Thanks for the info, much appreciated!

I hadn't seen that KB on switching the modes before, Interesting. We usually just try and keep them the same prior to imaging so it's never been an issue.  I was surprised to see that the SATA settings had any change at all on the NVME since it's pci-x. There are three options, AHCI, RAID, OFF. With AHCI or OFF i get a bluesscreen even going into recovery saying the bios is incompatible with the drive. However putting it on RAID mode allows it to boot recovery no problem. There is no raid, the board only has ONE m.2 slot. Still though, recovery isn't the goal, booting windows is the goal.

 

We have Dell Precision 3620 Towers running the latest bios 1.3.6 which the Dell site shows is the latest. 

After image the system goes pretty far into booting, passes the disk loader, but then hangs on classpnp.sys and bluescreens.

I used this same image on another model tower with an SSD and it boots no problem.

I saw your note about GPT, The Snap 5 build i have actually has the option to convert to GPT right in it, i have tried doing this and it still bluescreens. 

I keep the dell set at UEFI, but it won't boot becasue for UEFI there are no boot devices.  There is a "Add UEFI boot option" button, but when i click it it states there are no compatible partitions to boot to.

 

I'm not familar with minitool, but this could be somethign to try, i'll see what i can dig up.

 

As for the requirements for booting nvme, these are new statiosn from dell that ship only with an nvme and boot to them by default, so i know it's supported in some fashion.

Again, thanks for the help, i'll see about minitool or somethign else that can maybe help create the uefi boot sectors that i seem to not have..  If you have any other ideas about tools or software that can do such a task i'm definitely open to suggestions.

 

Thanks

Can you use your Dell one time boot override (F12 after reboot) to specicially pick UEFI boot of your USB flash drive with Acronis recovery media?  

In the newer Dells, they are set to UEFI by deault, but you can also enable CSM/Legacy mode, which might be something to try - we also disable secure boot when imaging.  

See if this post with screenshots helps at all - this is with a newer 5510 laptop.  I haven't gotten any new towers in quite some time.

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/121829#comment-378318

Thanks, but i have no problem booting acronis. I can uefi Or legacy boot acronis no problems. Image works great as well, converts to GPT and all seems well, but after that even though my disk is converted to gpt, it doesnt create the EFI folders on the boot drive, so the bios won't see it as a bootable device for UEFI. I can tell it to book legacy, but that's where i get the bluescreen. I tried injecting the Intel driver for NVME which is recomemnded on dells site but that didn't solve the issue. Ive tried legacy / raid on/  and disabled. I had high hopes for disabled, since this is an nvme drive plugged into a m.2 it doesnt even need the sata controller.  Still same issue though.

rja2, what was the SATA mode set to on the system you created the image from?  If it was AHCI, it must be AHCI on the new one, if it was RAID, it must be RAID on the new one.  

If it is booting, but getting a BSOD, driver compatibility is likely the problem.  Did you generalize the hardware during deployment?  If not, you should try that with the SATA mode set to match the original image version.

If it still BSOD's then it's probably not the NVME driver itself, but the IRST (RAID controller) drivers that are needed if the system is needing to boot in RAID mode.  You would have to create WinPE and inject the drivers using instructions I just posted in this thread:

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/112372#comment-387006