guide Booting NVMe drive from older/unsupported motherboards with clover - A simple guide

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As the title suggest, this guide will make you able to boot directly an NVMe drive with older motherboard that does not support booting trough NVMe protocol natively. Some preparation and checklist is including (and not limited to):

• Other PC that will be used to prepare the Bootable clover USB drive - Or you can use your target system that already have OS installed in other drive (SATA SSD/HDD)
• Motherboard with at least 1 free PCIe slot - having physical PCIe x4 or larger that unoccupied will help, but you can also put the NVMe drive in PCIe x1 slot with some speed penalty
• Motherboard with USB boot capabilities - Please beware, sometimes SD/MicroSD card reader built inside your laptop may doesn't support boot mode inside the BIOS
• An PCIe NVMe drive - Make sure it's not a M.2 SATA or M.2 PCIe AHCI SSD!
• A M.2 M Key to PCIe x4 adapter - for motherboard that only have PCIe x1 slot free, please bought applicable adapter or you can butcher either your adapter or motherboard PCIe slot (NOT RECOMMENDED)
• An unused USB drive or SD Card/MicroSD with the USB adapter - 2GB or more in capacity with good transfer speed recommended, but you can getaway with smaller drive (at least 128MB or more)
• Internet connection - For downloading the clover files

Tested system:

• Dell Inspiron 3647 / Vostro 3900 (i3-4160) + Samsung PM891a 512GB NVMe SSD - Windows 10 - UEFI (Used in this guide)
• Lenovo ThinkPad T430 (i7-3610QM) + Western Digital SN530 256GB SSD - Manjaro 20 KDE Plasma - UEFI
• Lenovo ThinkPad T400 (C2D P9700) + Western Digital SN530 256GB SSD - Manjaro 20 KDE Plasma - UEFI
• Asus X453MA (Pentium N3540) + Kingspec NE 2242 128GB SSD - Windows 10 - UEFI

• ASUS Z8NA-D6C (2x Xeon X5650) + Samsung 960 Evo 256GB - Windows 10 - UEFI

• Asrock P4i945GC (Pentium 4 550 HT) + Kingspec NE 2242 128GB SSD - Debian 10 XFCE Minimal - Legacy

Guide (Windows - Type all command without the quotation mark):

1. Make sure your NVMe drive is recognized in other system, you can do this by booting an OS from officially supported media, and see if partition in the drive is either detected or mounted, or you can launch your OS specific disk drive manager like Windows Disk Management (windows) or lsblk (Linux) and see if the NVMe drive is detected.
2. Download the clover files here - Choose the latest release, in the case of writing this article is CloverV2-5155.zip
3. Prepare your SD/USB drive, make sure you backup your important data before formatting it. launch diskpart, either trough run or windows search or command prompt/Windows Terminal/Powershell, this will prompt windows admin warning, click OK to continue
4. Now type "list disk", and you can identify which drive is the USB drive you mount by see the total capacity (in my case is disk 2)
5. Type "select disk X" (X = your SD/USB disk number, eg. "select disk 2), and type "clean" to delete all partition (WARNING - YOUR DATA WILL BE DELETED)
6. Now open windows Disk Management, and find your SD/USB disk that already been formatted, right click on formatted partition, and select "New simple volume" option
7. For the size, type "512" (in MB; for USB/SD drive capacity more than 512MB), and click next, and select your desired drive letter path (or use default assigned by windows) and click next
8. For filesystem, choose FAT32, with default allocation size, and volume label "clover" for ease of navigation later and click next and finish
9. After your new partition is successfully mounted, extract the zipped clover folder, and go to inside of "CloverV2" folder, and copy the content to your USB drive
10. now inside your USB Drive root folder, copy "NvmExpressDxe.efi" file, located in "/EFI/Clover/drivers/off" folder, to "/EFI/CLOVER/BIOS", "/EFI/CLOVER/UEFI", "/EFI/CLOVER/drivers32uefi", and /EFI/CLOVER/drivers32uefi" folder respectively.
11. Now, back to your USB Drive root folder, go to "/EFI/CLOVER" folder and rename "config-sample.plist" to "config.plist".
12. Edit the "config.plist" file with notepad or other plain text editor (Notepad++ is recommended)
13. Find "<Key>Boot</Key>" line and scroll down a bit and you will find "<Key>Timeout</Key>" line, below that, default value is "<interger>5</interger>", this value represented how many second clover will automatically boot when user input is not detected, you can change it to your desired value, in my case, I put "10" for 10 seconds. Save and close the text editor.
14. Now reboot your PC, and select boot drive to the USB/SD drive (either using boot menu shortcut or set it up manually via BIOS boot order). If you see the clover boot menu, congrats!
15. Now shutdown your PC, plug your NVMe drive (if not already), and try to boot from it. If your NVMe drive doesn't have any OS installed, please install it like usual.
16. Now, after installing either your NVMe drive or installing the OS inside it (or both), you can directly boot to the NVMe drive via the clover boot menu selector!

Photos for the guide:

Diskpart:

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Windows Disk Management (in this case clover drive already prepared beforehand):

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Clover root folder inside the USB/SD drive:

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Editing the "config.plist" file:

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System info for the test system (Dell Inspiron 3647/Vostro 3900) using HWInfo:

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If you have any question regarding this thread, don't afraid to ask down below, Cheers!

 

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Post edit changelog:

1. (18/10/2023) Initial post with preparation for windows system tutorial.
2. (18/10/2023) Added "System info for the test system (Dell Inspiron 3647/Vostro 3900) using HWInfo:" picture .

 

[PDifolco]

Nice

Won't a simple PCie adapter work ?

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2 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Nice

Won't a simple PCie adapter work ?

for older motherboard like AMD AM3+ or Intel Haswell based motherboard and older, you can't directly boot from NVMe SSD because lack of NVMe boot argument in the BIOS firmware, this guide is used to fix the issue. Meanwhile for use as basic data drive (not a Boot drive), you can plug it in any PCIe-compatible motherboard and OS (Windows 7 with latest patch and NVMe driver installed or Linux mainline kernel 3.3 onwards)

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5 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Nice

Won't a simple PCie adapter work ?

Meanwhile, some Chinese vendor that produce "brand new" motherboard for older platform added the NVMe boot arguments in the BIOS firmware, as far back in Intel Sandy Bridge / Sandy bridge HEDT motherboard they produced (Intel X79 and C602, and consumer B75, H61, Z79, etc). Some higher end motherboard from "branded OEM" in the Intel Haswell era, like HP Zx40 series (Z440/Z640/Z840) workstation, Dell Alienware Area 51 R2, and some consumer Z97 motherboard got BIOS update that add the NVMe boot argument capabilities.