NVMe confusion - Only works and stable as MBR, not GPT

Akill3s · August 23, 2018

I am more just trying to understand WHY it's working when every forum and says it should not.

I have a UEFI BIOS and updated to latest version. Board is an Asus E3 Pro-Gaming v5. NVMe is a 480gb Corsair MP300 and my M.2 slot caps at pcie x2. I have checked in crystaldisk. I get 1500gbps Read and 1050 Write. Far faster than my old Samsung SSD.

So here it is. I installed drive, formatted it to GPT, installed W10. It crashed on boot saying error 0xc000000f. Master Boot Record. The BIOS was done as I was told to. Brand new NVMe, I power down and BOOM....I load to W10. I restart....0xc000000f. I shut down, mind you at this point and during install only the NVMe was plugged in. I restart....boom W10. I restart...error. and on it goes.

So often so I called Microsoft. They remote in and see my disk has 4 partitions. System, Primary, etc. And Recovery. They said I should not see recovery on their. This was Level 2, not call centers that script read. Microsoft said my boot drive NEEDS to be MBR not GPT even for NVMe. At this point format to MBR to use for now as storage, but I decide to clone my SSD which is MBR.....I clone that.

BOOM! W10 works, no more errors, even did the "refresh windows". Works perfect.

Why??? My UEFI was reset to default. And apparently MBR works and I still get my advertised NVMe speeds. All i read is GPT not MBR and MBR will not work.

But it does. Then i read and i hear GPT is for drives over 2TB...which NVMes are not at yet. I want to understand and even just hear that...yes. MBR is absolutely a valid format for NVMe.

W10 did not want to install properly with GPT. I made 2 install USBs, one with an .iso and one with Windows Media Creation. Both same results.

Thanks

Electronics Wizardy · August 23, 2018

Yes nvme works fine with gpt, I have done this many times. Seems like a bug with your board.

gpt also has many benfits if you drive is under 2tb aswell, you should basically always use it unless you have problems in this case or a very old system.