Booting from PCIe based SSD (HP box, AMI BIOS)

[mschwett]

Hi - I've put a OWC 240GB PCIe based SSD in my machine, an HP h9-1150. It uses an AMI BIOS. The drive doesn't show up as a boot option in the boot order menu of the BIOS. If I disable booting from the drives connected to the internal SATA controller (a pair of 3TB drives in a stripe set and an older 120GB intel SSD) I get a "no boot disk" type of error. The only other relevant option in the BIOS is RAID vs AHCI emulation for the onboard controller, which has no effect on the problem.

So far HP and OWC have been less than helpful, although the OWC guys seem to be thinking about it.

Any suggestions? Does it matter which slot it's placed in? The HP live chat people seemed to suggest that no hard drive controller in a PCIe slot was bootable with this BIOS, which I just don't believe. Thanks in advance!!

 

[weaselman]

well there right you would need board that could boot via the pci-e slot. So if there is no option in the bios of the board then it will not support a Pci-e SSD as a boot drive.
It will only support the drive through windows once the drivers for the card are installed.

Your solution would be to look for a board that supports booting from the Pci-e slot, there is no other way around your problem.

 

[mschwett]

well there right you would need board that could boot via the pci-e slot. So if there is no option in the bios of the board then it will not support a Pci-e SSD as a boot drive.
It will only support the drive through windows once the drivers for the card are installed.

Your solution would be to look for a board that supports booting from the Pci-e slot, there is no other way around your problem.

thanks for the reply!

no driver is required for windows to see the drive - as soon as i installed it, it showed up in disk manager. so it's just a boot issue.

the pci-e ssd appears as a drive connected to a marvel sata controller. does this mean that this system board (and presumably most others with AMI BIOS???) can't boot from a device connected to a SATA controller in an expansion slot? that seems ridiculous!!

 

[mschwett]

I moved the card into a new machine and it works perfectly. boots, easy install of windows 7 from USB. boots crazy fast and quietly.

not impressed by HP bios.

 

[PheckPhul]

I moved the card into a new machine and it works perfectly. boots, easy install of windows 7 from USB. boots crazy fast and quietly.

not impressed by HP bios.

What motherboard is used by the machine in which the PCIe SSD works?