Veriton X2632G NVMe support

canobi

Hey there,

 

would it be possible to boot aVeriton X2632G off of a NVMe SSD? I can see the last BIOS update for that machine was almost 1.5 years ago, so I'm assuming it wouldn't?

 

But, the interwebs are saying that one can make a custom BIOS and enable this support, using the following steps:

1. dump and save the current BIOS from your machine
2. find a BIOS image for a newer machine and extract NVMe modules from it
3. merge the extracted NVMe modules into the BIOS image saved from your machine, and finally...
4. update your machine's firmware with the new version of the BIOS

So an alternative question would be - which BIOS image for Veriton desktops could I use as a "donor" of NVMe modules?

 

I plan to add a small SSD as a boot and application drive, leaving the regular HDD for storing data. The SSD would be installed on a PCIe expansion card (i.e. a Lycom M.2 SSD to PCIe adapter).

canobi

Well, for everyone who's interested, and to answer my own question, the answer is "not supported". In other words, the X2632G BIOS will not recognize a NVMe disk and will not offer it in the boot menu, irrespective of how it was installed and partitioned (i.e. BIOS or UEFI, MBR or GPT partitions).

Luckily with Linux, it's not that difficult to circumvent, provided you keep your HDD in the machine. The workaround is to install the boot loader and boot partition on the HDD, and install everything else on the SSD. The overhead of loading from the HDD is maybe 1 or 2 seconds tops, while the rest of the boot continues from SSD and the speedup is 'uge (for me, went down to 4 seconds from 15+ seconds total boot time). systemd-boot can do this with no problems.

If ACER ever releases a firmware update to recognize NVMe bootable drives, then even this workaround will not be necessary.

 

BTW, I don't know (and don't care) if the same can be done with Windows.