SIGH....Nitro 5 (AN515-42) and more questions about the M.2 SSD upgrade

BeritOlam
BeritOlam Member Posts: 8

Tinkerer

edited November 2023 in 2019 Archives
First time Acer game-machine buyer here. Long-time computer upgrading tinkerer....

Recently purchased a Nitro 5 in the AN515-42 set-up from the Ebay Refurb store for my sons. Very happy with the bang for the buck this provides. Not so happy with the 7200rpm spinner speeds. One of the reasons I bought this was for the M.2 upgrade option.

So here's where we are....
(1) Found the thread in here saying to make sure it's M.2 SATA for the "42" lineup...and NOT NVMe. So all good in the hood here.
(2) Operation of the Crucial stick install went fine. No issues.
(3) Went into Bios. 1TB spinner shows up as HDD0; M.2 drive and ID shows up under HDD01. I move over to boot managment....and no option to boot to M.2.
(4) Next rebooted Windows 10 that came installed on 1TB. Open Disk Management program....and there's the SSD showing up as unallocated.
(5) SSD drive can be formatted and works just fine....as a slave drive.
(6) I use Macrium (free) to clone the drive. 45 minutes later....success.
(7) Reboot into bios....and it still only recognizes the 1TB device to boot.
(8) The go back and set bios to boot from USB, Bios recognized my 16gb Windows 10 USB install backup.
(9) Booted USB drive. But it only recognizes the 1TB drive for a fresh Windows install. No option to install Windows onto the M.2 drive.

Not really much else to report. Laptop came with Bios v1.10...upgraded to 1.13....same issue.

Have found a few Youtube videos doing this Nitro 5 upgrade....but it appears all of them are AN515-5x series. Bios there seems to recognize it, no issues

I did find one YouTuber that looks like he has the same AN515-42 system....and it appears he has a 128gb M.2 running along with his 1TB.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJVGpoFhJbc
Only thing I can see from his specs is that he's running Bios 1.08. Any chance the newer bioses are causing the problem? Is it worth a try to back track from 1.13 to 1.08?

Not a huge deal breaker, as I have a spare 500gb Crucial 2.5in SSD that I can (hopefully!) install in its place of the 1TB spinner. Performance should be about the same, me thinks, as running Windows on an M.2 SATA drive. And that will still do what I need it to do...give the kiddos a place to game.

egydiocoelho, you seem like you are up-to-date on matters related to this. Anything new to report?  Anything else I could try?  Time to bring in Acer Technical Support?

Thanks in advance!

Answers

  • BeritOlam
    BeritOlam Member Posts: 8

    Tinkerer

    Any thoughts @Acer-Manny?  Really love this computer for the price. Worked in IT a number of years ago, and I remember seeing all sorts of weird Bios things. But don't think I ever recall a situation where a 2nd drive works just fine in Windows 10 as slave drive...and yet there's no option to boot from it.