Acer desktop VM6630G and NVME SSD via a Orico NVME M.1 Expansion Card and booting from it?

Hello,

I have an older Acer desktop VM66306 and I have installed a Orico NVME M.2 expansion card in it with a INTEL 1TB NVME SSD card in the expansion slot.

My current boot drive is a SATA 500GB SSD drive.

I have tried several times using MiniTool Partition Manager to clone the 500GB sata drive to the nvme card.

I can clone it but I cannot make the NVME drive bootable. I have tried many different combinations but can never boot from it.

I can see the NVME drive in windows OK and can browse its files both in Windows explorer and I also see it in Windows DIsk Manager and Minitool.

Any suggestions appreciated.

Thank you

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Acer-Samuel

Accepted answers

billsey

It should be faster, not as fast as if the M.2 slot were built into the MB, but faster than the SATA 3 speeds you're getting out of the current SSD. You're limited to the PCIx buss speeds with an add-in card.

All comments

billsey

That is correct, almost no add-in cards are bootable. They work for expanding your storage space, but not for booting. You can potentially move your C: drive to the NVMe but you'll have to continue booting from the onboard controller. Some higher end RAID cards have boot function, but nothing cheaper does.

Neil787

Thank you very much for the quick reply Bill. Very much appreciated.

Do you know if the NVMe SSD will be faster than my current boot drive a SATA SAMSUNG EVO 500GB SSD?

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Acer-Samuel

billsey

It should be faster, not as fast as if the M.2 slot were built into the MB, but faster than the SATA 3 speeds you're getting out of the current SSD. You're limited to the PCIx buss speeds with an add-in card.

Neil787

THank you very much

Neil787

Hi Bill,

Another question about the nvme if I may.

I have it installed and formatted as a NTFS drive (data)

The problem I am having is if I do a manual windows restart the system hangs in the bios and does not boot. Just hangs there.

If I power off then back on the system boots windows ok.

If I remove the nvme m.2 expansion card and drive I can do a manual windows restart with no problem.

I am running fully patched Windows x64

Any ideas or suggestions?

THank you

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Acer-Samuel

billsey

Boy, that's a weird one. Fire up Disk Management and let me know if there are any hidden partition on that drive.

Neil787

Thank you Bill,

The drive WAS allocated mbr it had two partitions one large ntfs and a very small 1.9gb unallocated and the rest a ntfs partition and the problem was happening. I wiped the whole disk and created it as GPT and formatted is it all as one ntfs partition and the problem is still happening when I do a windows restart. If I remove the expansion card and nvme drive I have no problems doing a windows restart and complete boot.