M.2 Issues

[CosmicRetrograde]

I just got an m.2 drive and I'm currently using a HDD, when i installed the m.2 into my asus z170-ar it booted and said that I couldn't use botht he m.2 and HDD. Is there a way around this issue? 

[Crunchy Dragon]

If I was you, I'd migrate my Windows install to the M.2 drive and then set up the HDD as a mass storage drive

[RAM555789]

Have many other PCIe slots are in use (by GPU, sound card, ect.) and what CPU are you using?

[Mira Yurizaki]

9 minutes ago, CosmicRetrograde said:

I just got an m.2 drive and I'm currently using a HDD, when i installed the m.2 into my asus z170-ar it booted and said that I couldn't use botht he m.2 and HDD. Is there a way around this issue? 

Normally if you plug in something in the M.2 slot, it disables a SATA port or two. So you may need to swap which SATA port the HDD is on.

[knightslugger]

8 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

If I was you, I'd migrate my Windows install to the M.2 drive and then set up the HDD as a mass storage drive

SSDs have on-the-fly encryption keys that are shared between the OS and the drive at the time of installation. The Windows installation from the HDD will either have the wrong keys or no keys at all and when the system tries to access a part of the drive that is encrypted, it will try 12 times before hard locking forcing a forced restart to reset the counter. I have been fighting this exact problem for the better part of a YEAR and just figured it out a few weeks ago.

 

ALWAYS when switching your boot from one media to the next, MAKE A NEW INSTALLATION of Windows.

[NumLock21]

Check your manual, SATA port could be shared with your M.2

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, NumLock21 said:

Check your manual, SATA port could be shared with your M.2

I thought that was only a Gigabyte thing?

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 minutes ago, knightslugger said:

SSDs have on-the-fly encryption keys that are shared between the OS and the drive at the time of installation. The Windows installation from the HDD will either have the wrong keys or no keys at all and when the system tries to access a part of the drive that is encrypted, it will try 12 times before hard locking forcing a forced restart to reset the counter. I have been fighting this exact problem for the better part of a YEAR and just figured it out a few weeks ago.

 

ALWAYS when switching your boot from one media to the next, MAKE A NEW INSTALLATION of Windows.

I recently cloned from an HDD to an SSD and I've encountered no such problem. Do you have a source for this?

[paddy-stone]

Just now, Crunchy Dragon said:

I thought that was only a Gigabyte thing?

Nope, pretty much all motherboards with M.2 slots, when populated it disables 1 or more SATA.

[NumLock21]

2 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I thought that was only a Gigabyte thing?

Some Asus boards are shared too. But yeah, I've seen that mostly on Gigabyte's. And it also depends, more expensive ones will tend to reduce bandwidth rather than outright disable them.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, paddy-stone said:

Nope, pretty much all motherboards with M.2 slots, when populated it disables 1 or more SATA.

Interesting, on PC Part Picker I only get notified of that when I use Gigabyte boards

[paddy-stone]

Just now, M.Yurizaki said:

I recently cloned from an HDD to an SSD and I've encountered no such problem. Do you have a source for this?

Agree, have done many times without problem. I always have at least 1 drive image to use for other machines or for re-installing to new HDD or in case of failure... very rarely have any problems.

[knightslugger]

6 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I recently cloned from an HDD to an SSD and I've found no such problem. Do you have a source for this?

I've read so many tech forums about the debugger i've lost count. There was one from Tom's that was the one that set me in the right direction. The same pattern was always there: cloned a boot drive to SSD, and getting seemingly random hard locks, same debugger. I wish i could remember the error name. 0x12 is what it started with, the 12 denoted the amount of tries the system attempted, and 12 is the counter limit.

 

I wiped the drive clean, gave it a new install, and i was in like sin. been 100% stable for at least the last 2 weeks straight, several weeks before on and off, never a problem.

 

Something maybe specific to the MX series of SSDs, that was also another recurring theme. almost always Crucial.

[paddy-stone]

1 minute ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Interesting, on PC Part Picker I only get notified of that when I use Gigabyte boards

PCPP isn't exactly the best place to look for stuff like this, I ALWAYS double check on the actual manufacturers site to see the full spec... usually it is with a * next to the M.2 info and then under the notes says for example "M.2_1 and SATA 5 shares lanes, if either one is in use the other will be disabled!

 

Storage

- 4 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s Connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 10), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug*
- 1 x Ultra M.2 Socket (M2_1), supports M Key type 2242/2260/2280 M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen3 x4 (32 Gb/s) (with Ryzen Series CPU) or Gen3 x2 (16 Gb/s) (with A-Series APU)**
- 1 x M.2 Socket (M2_2), supports M Key type 2230/2242/2260/2280 M.2 SATA3 6.0 Gb/s module**
 

*M2_2 and SATA3_3 share lanes. If either one of them is in use, the other one will be disabled.

**Supports NVMe SSD as boot disks
Supports ASRock U.2 Kit

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 minutes ago, knightslugger said:

I've read so many tech forums about the debugger i've lost count. There was one from Tom's that was the one that set me in the right direction. The same pattern was always the same: cloned a boot drive to SSD, and getting seemingly random hard locks. I wish i could remember the error name. 0x12 is what it started with, the 12 denoted the amount of tries the system attempted, and 12 is the counter limit.

Was the hard drive encrypted in the first place?

 

I find it hard to believe there's an SSD with automagic on-the-fly encryption using shared keys with the OS (because then that limits which OSes the SSD is good for). For a consumer model at least.

[CosmicRetrograde]

So I have tried all the other SATA ports and it still hasn't worked. I've checked disk management and it hasn't shown up there either. What's the point of having an m.2 slot if all the SATA ports are disabled when it's in use?

[dual290x]

My old MSI board was the same way, it would disable two sata ports, On my current ASRock board it does the same thing. Linus talked about it.

[dual290x]

1 minute ago, CosmicRetrograde said:

So I have tried all the other SATA ports and it still hasn't worked. I've checked disk management and it hasn't shown up there either. What's the point of having an m.2 slot if all the SATA ports are disabled when it's in use?

Not all of them, just one or two. Most people aren't going to use an m.2 and all (for example) six sata ports.

[CosmicRetrograde]

Just now, dual290x said:

Not all of them, just one or two. Most people aren't going to use an m.2 and all (for example) six sata ports.

I've tried my HDD in all the SATA ports, even the ones for the SATA express. None of them will allow me to use the m.2 and HDD at the same time, unfortunately. I don't know if there is anything else i can try, other than contacting ASUS.

[dual290x]

2 minutes ago, CosmicRetrograde said:

I've tried my HDD in all the SATA ports, even the ones for the SATA express. None of them will allow me to use the m.2 and HDD at the same time, unfortunately. I don't know if there is anything else i can try, other than contacting ASUS.

Have you checked your BIOS settings? If you have then contacting ASUS is your best bet.

[knightslugger]

Just now, M.Yurizaki said:

Was the hard drive encrypted in the first place?

 

I find it hard to believe there's an SSD with automagic on-the-fly encryption using shared keys with the OS (because then that limits which OSes the SSD is good for). For a consumer model at least.

Some of the replies thought it might have been something left over from bitlocker, which is only present in the Pro version of W10. My install was on Home, so bitlocker *shouldn't* have been even installed, and i know damn well i didn't have the pro version on there, or the dongle dealybob that Asus will sell to enable hardware bitlocker.

So i'm not entirely sure. I do know that those MX drives have some sort of invisible 256-bit AES encryption on them, and a LOT of people were eyeballing the relationship between the drive and the OS not sharing a key.

[CosmicRetrograde]

I seem to have found the culprit. In the darkest depths of my BIOS i found a toggle to switch between SATA express and m.2. Thanks for all the help everyone! <3

[kirashi]

41 minutes ago, knightslugger said:

SSDs have on-the-fly encryption keys that are shared between the OS and the drive at the time of installation. The Windows installation from the HDD will either have the wrong keys or no keys at all and when the system tries to access a part of the drive that is encrypted, it will try 12 times before hard locking forcing a forced restart to reset the counter. I have been fighting this exact problem for the better part of a YEAR and just figured it out a few weeks ago.

 

ALWAYS when switching your boot from one media to the next, MAKE A NEW INSTALLATION of Windows.

37 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I recently cloned from an HDD to an SSD and I've encountered no such problem. Do you have a source for this?

This isn't exactly true - while SSD's do support the aforementioned encryption feature, the actual issue I believe is that disks formatted as GPT have their own UUID which CANNOT be the same between disks. Some cloning programs are smart enough to do bit-for-bit clones of disks skipping over the UUID, while others try to clone the UUID as well. When this happens, your system will either not boot at all, or you can run into issues down the road, or, if you're lucky, your drives might be smart enough and just ignore the UUID GPT partition clone alltogether.

 

Unless you actively turn on SSD level encryption, it shouldn't affect your installation or ability to clone the drive with the right software. That being said, it's usually still enabled in some form or another because it's hardware based, but it'll just be transparent to the user if not actually in use.

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 minutes ago, kirashi said:

This isn't exactly true - while SSD's do support the aforementioned encryption feature, the actual issue I believe is that disks formatted as GPT have their own UUID which CANNOT be the same between disks. Some cloning programs are smart enough to do bit-for-bit clones of disks skipping over the UUID, while others try to clone the UUID as well. When this happens, your system will either not boot at all, or you can run into issues down the road, or, if you're lucky, your drives might be smart enough and just ignore the UUID GPT partition clone alltogether.

Now that you mentioned it, when I booted into the cloned SSD, Windows took the HDD offline by default. It didn't complain when I brought it up though.

[Mira Yurizaki]

@kirashi

http://www.multibooters.com/tutorials/resolve-a-disk-signature-collision.html

 

Found an article that talks about this. It looks like in Windows Vista, Microsoft implemented drive signatures. This may get copied over in cloning tools but all that happens on the next boot is the other disk is taken offline more as a sign that something needs user intervention. If you bring it back online, Windows just assigns a new UID.