crazy booting idea for an older motherboard. would it work?

[mito551]

i bought myself a samsung 960 evo even though my motherboard doesn't have m.2 slot and just got an adapter for it. i tried going into bios and my pcie-m.2 ssd was nowhere to be found, but booting an existing windows installation (on an older sata ssd, which is way too small for me) and voila, it's there and it's detected. hence i assume there would be no issue installing windows on this drive. the issue that i'm assuming i will run into (i can't test it right now, really looking forward to testing everything out) is that i can't boot from this drive since my mobo wouldn't report that it exists. what i'm thinking though is that it potentially would be possible to leave my previous windows install be and tell my mobo to boot from this ssd (ocz, older ssd) only to go to mbr and tell mbr to boot from the newer ssd (samsung) since i have noticed that mbr is capable of choosing different OSes if it can detect them. i'm concerned that i may not be able to tell mbr on my ocz that i have another OS installed on the samsung pcie-connected ssd.

to sum it all up: i want to install windows on a pcie ssd and boot from it. my mobo doesn't seem to support it. that's why i want my mobo to boot from an ssd that it supports. when it boots windows, it goes through mbr OS selection screen and i choose my pcie ssd installation. questionable life choices and logic aside, would that work?

i have i7-2600 on asus p8p67 rev3.1 and i have not updated my bios since i bought it in 2011. nevertheless it supports an 8tb drive. my ssds are samsung 960 evo and ocz vertex3. i will be happy to provide more info and if noone can actually answer the question i would like to know if people are curious whether that whole scheme would work when i actually try it out.

thanks for reading and happy holidays! :)

[Wasty]

Easy solution - Buy new mobo.

[Quaker]

Your motherboard probably doesn't support NVMe drives. Even though Windows sees the drive, can you actually access it (read, write)? Even if Windows can access it, that means you need the Windows drivers running in order to do it.

Only newer motherboards have support for NVMe. It's time you upgraded your CPU and motherboard anyway, but I'd wait for Kaby Lake or Ryzen at this point.

[mito551]

12 hours ago, Quaker said:

Your motherboard probably doesn't support NVMe drives. Even though Windows sees the drive, can you actually access it (read, write)? Even if Windows can access it, that means you need the Windows drivers running in order to do it.

Only newer motherboards have support for NVMe. It's time you upgraded your CPU and motherboard anyway, but I'd wait for Kaby Lake or Ryzen at this point.

huh, didn't think about that. I need to try and see. when you're installing windows, don't its drivers load up anyway? I'm definitely waiting for ryzen because I want intel to respond to it somehow. 

 

thank you for your answer

 

12 hours ago, Wasty said:

Easy solution - Buy new mobo.

not so easy lmao. I don't want to buy new mobo, cpu and ram now because Intel didn't do anything "interesting" with their cpus for quite a while and now they will have to because of ryzen. at least that's what I'm counting on. whether that means cheaper hexacore or octacore kaby lake or better cannonlake, I'll see to get something that's the closest to the best. 

thanks for answering! 

[Quaker]

I don't know what you're expecting from Intel when Ryzen arrives. About the only thing I can see is, if Ryzen is a success, Intel's prices may go down.

This whole NVMe thing - plus USB 3.0, M.2, DDR4, etc - not to mention how relatively slow your old i7-2600 is - you tell you it's already past time to upgrade.

[mito551]

On 12/24/2016 at 4:41 PM, Quaker said:

I don't know what you're expecting from Intel when Ryzen arrives. About the only thing I can see is, if Ryzen is a success, Intel's prices may go down.

This whole NVMe thing - plus USB 3.0, M.2, DDR4, etc - not to mention how relatively slow your old i7-2600 is - you tell you it's already past time to upgrade.

I'm expecting exactly that: a price drop on 7th or 8th gen. 

 

i was wondering if my i7-2600 was still good enough for gaming and light content creation, and i heard many people say that it indeed was good enough for now. i saw that in the way of seeing my laptop cpu (i7-6600U) being noticeably worse that my desktop i7-2600 in one, quite specific, cpu-bound task. it wasn't a benchmark per se, but it did explain very well that I need to keep my expectations in check when comparing desktop and laptop cpus. 

 

my 960 evo with asus hyper adapter worked perfectly fine, I installed Windows, but I can't boot it now, it tells me that the installation is broken and it can't locate winload.exe. I'm trying to play around with a workaround, but am yet to come up with a solution. 

 

my motherboard doesn't show 960 as a bootable medium, whereas it does show my usb windows install drive as a uefi bootable medium. not sure if that means that it theoretically supports uefi boot from a pcie drive or not, but it does give me hope. i have my hands sort of full without all of this, so I'll have to play around with it a little bit later and see if I can get away with such craziness or, ultimately, not. 

 

also, what would the lifespan of the ssd be if i use it for my games with my os on a separate ssd? would it be negligible if I use it or if I put it in a box until I get a new mobo with an m.2 slot?