Booting PCI-e storage not visible in uefi bios
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Hello,
I was wondering if Refind would be able to boot a m.2 drive on a pci-e adapter that is not seen by the uefi bios?
I have a Gigabyte Z77x-ud3h (rev.1.0) mainboard with a Samsung SM951 AHCI drive in a PCI-e adapter. If I boot Windows 10 or Ubuntu 14.4 from a regular sata drive, they can access the SM951 drive without problem, but in the uefi bios it's not visible. I tried booting Refind from a USB key, and it also doesn't see this drive.
So I was wondering if Refind could somehow be made to mount this drive via a script installed on the Refind usb drive? Meaning the pc would start from this usb drive and it would somehow manage to mount the SM951 and chainboot onto it. (The sm951 is formatted as GPT with Windows 10 and its efi partition boots fine with a Z97 mainboard.)
Many thanks for any help !
Last edit: Joncas 2016-01-31
If you can find an EFI driver for your board, rEFInd might be able to load and use it. (rEFInd can load and use filesystem drivers, but this feature is untested with other driver types -- at least, AFAIK.) EFI hardware drivers are pretty rare, though; they're either built into boards as firmware or are unavailable to the general public, in my experience. Still, you could check with the board's manufacturer. Also check with the manufacturer of the chipset used by the board.
If you find a driver file but can't get it to work, please contact me; I'd be interested in improving rEFInd to get this working if it doesn't already work.
Hello,
I couldn't find an efi driver as such, but what does work is the method described in this link :
http://www.overclock.net/t/1571271/tutorial-how-to-add-nvme-support-on-any-ami-uefi-bios-with-an-intel-chipset
(by now the MMtool is on version 5)
So I downloaded the bios for GA-Z97X-UD3H, then since I don't have the nvme version of the samsung sm951 but only ahci, I extracted the "pciesatacontroller" module from the Z97 bios and then inserted it into the Z77 bios (mmtool first gave an error that "the file size exceeds the volume size", so by looking in the internet, found the recommendation to delete some unneeded module to make space - I delete "oemLogos" !).
After flashing back the modified Z77 bios, the pci-e ssd now boots fine.
I don't know whether the module extracted from the Z97 bios is something that rEFInd can load on the fly, at the very least there would be some problem as to formatting/packaging and calling it. Anyhow, I enclose it plus the nvme modules in case they can help anyone else.
i have the same motherboard i want to boot this Samsung 960 EVO Series - 500GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 and Asus PCI3.0 4 M2 4 1 3PIN 32GBIT SUP PCIE SSD
can you help me?
thanks