marcusb,

I think i just found your problem. See this support issue over at Supermicro:

http://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/faq.cfm?faq=22023

Question
I'm using your X10dri-t and want to boot from the Samsung SM951 (with adapter on pcie) is this possible ?
Answer
No, the BIOS lacks the necessary code currently.

Hi,

thanks for reactivating the thread after one year and trying to solve again... (I just got the new-post-email a few days delayed, but no prob..)

I do not own the supermicro server any more... I have access to it, but it is on production and I do not have a spare NVME Drive to mkae tests with.
I "solved" the problem by using a normal SATA SSD for booting and installing the SQL Server for performance-boosts on the NVMe, which I could
access after boot as a normal drive...

somehow it was funny to read, that after one year the same members posted almost the same answers as one year before... and btw... the support-issue
at supermicro mentioned by moore327 was opened by myself there... the support was quite bad... I am still quite sure, that it would be possible to boot directly
via NVMe with this board, but I do not have enough knowlege for tweaking uefi skripts and so on, nor do I have the time to jump deeper into this.

thanx for your support anyways! Great forum, great members!

regards
yves

Looking at the EFI shell is a desperation measure to prove that there is something wrong with the BIOS.

OBVIOUSLY I have set the slots to EFI, the boot is set to UEFI only (not Dual) and CSM is switched off

The machine boots from the USB key, the windows install DOES find the M2 PCIe disk, it DOES install windows to it.
But on reboot, (with the install key out) the boot goes nowhere because the machine BIOS cannot find anything to boot from.

Why?
Because at the BIOS level it could not find any bootable Hard disk, in this case the only one that is attached is the M.2 PCIe disk in a PCIe slot.

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So my request was that IF you have a server board, and it is a X10 DRI0-T, and if it does magically (or not) boot to the PCIe drive, then
anyway boot to the EFI shell
At the prompt you would type

map -b -t hd

to show all the hard disks

then if the M2 PCIe disk is really showing up please paste the path contents here so I can try to figure out if there is anyway to run another EFI shell command to perhaps discover the card.
Oh and tell me what slot your PCIe disk is int.

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I've contacted Supermicro support more than 2 months now, they are good but so far they have not had a DRI-T board to replicate on.

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Further debug in analysisng the PCIe disk shows that windows install really does write all the correct information to the PCIe hard disk on installation i.e. it creates the correct partions EFI, RECOVERY and OS
It is just that there is no entry into the boot list for the drive (aka Windows Boot manager) and that is consistent with the fact that the boot UEFI BIOS finds nothing


regards marcus.

Hi marcus,

thanks for your efforts. Unfortunately I cannot provide the requested information, because the server is in production and boots from a SATA SSD.
After boot, the PCI SSD is visible and accessible. I am afraid to kill a working machine, if I change anything... this setup took a long time for me, and
I cannot afford to interrupt production times.
But I have another machine, where I am actually trying the same... maybe you can provide some useful information there too?

Samsung PM951 / SM951 on a Asus Rampage IV Black (X79) - is it (meanwhile) possible

thanks anyways,
yves

I am new to this forum but I also was searching the Net up and down for answers on booting from NVMe from a Supermicro X10DAX which also has the C612 Chipset.
I have tried the following NVMe's: Samsung OEM SM951 256GB, Samsung 960 EVO 250GB, Corsair MP500 120GB, and a few other cheaper one from OCZ and I believe the other was a Plextor without any success. I can not see any of these in the device list. Then I cam across a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB and to my surprise this one worked. Not only in UEFI but with a Legacy install of Win Server2012R2!! It baffles me why this drive works but none other regardless if it is an UEFI install or not.
I would love to use a different smaller NVMe drive with my board because it seems a waste of money and space running a 35GB system install on a NVMe with 512GB of space, but for now I'm OK with it.
Just thought you may like to know because I believe it is somewhat related to your issues.

Thanks for the great info on the Samsung 950 Pro. That explains a lot.
And yes, I was referring to the list of the bootable devices within the BIOS.
Do you know of other NVMe's which have that "NVMe Option ROM in the box" ?

No, it seems to be the only one with option-ROM. It seems that it is detected as AHCI-drive in BIOS, after loading OS working in NVMe-mode.
I have this SSD too and it isn't shown as PCIe-SSD in BIOS/UEFI.
Or you opt with an older AHCI-PCIe-SSD, but hard to find in new condition.

Zitat von SnowDigger im Beitrag #20

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I have tried the following NVMe's: Samsung OEM SM951 256GB, Samsung 960 EVO 250GB, Corsair MP500 120GB, and a few other cheaper one from OCZ and I believe the other was a Plextor without any success. I can not see any of these in the device list. Then I cam across a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB and to my surprise this one worked. Not only in UEFI but with a Legacy install of Win Server2012R2!! It baffles me why this drive works but none other regardless if it is an UEFI install or not.

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Marcusb, I believe I happened across your blog in which you got your board to work with the 960 EVO. I'm in the same situation and have just recently submitted a ticket to Supermicro. I believe this is your blog https://majzel.blogspot.com/2017/01/supermicro-support.html. However, you failed to mention what settings you used to get it to show up after installing the OS. Which BIOS version are using and what settings? Thanks.

Hi, I have Supermicro X9DAi and I recommend test multiple PCIe slots and tweak Maximum Payload Size/Read Request and also enable PCIe bifurcation.

My configuration:
- PCIe #1 @16 mode = poor perforrmance (sequential write accidentally drops to 100 MB/s)
- PCIe #1 @bifurcation x4x4x4x4 or x4x4x8 or x8x8 mode = drive not detect at all
- PCIe #3 @16 mode = poor perforrmance (sequential write accidentally drops to 100 MB/s)
- PCIe #3 @bifurcation x4x4x4x4 or x4x4x8 mode = good performance

I think this is caused by poor layout optimization. I never saw Supermicro motherboard which was fasted than Asus or Intel. Shame on Supermicro engineers. :-)

Hi JanCerny,

It might sound like a dumb question, but (physically) what do you call the PCIe #3 ? Do you refer to the slot4 on the motherboard ?


i'm asking the question because i have the same motherboard and i just bought a Nvme EVO 970 mounted on a Startech PCIe card and i'm trying to install Windows10 on it,
I can't figure how to configure the damn thing. When i try to install from the USB Stick, Windows 10 sees the Nvme, but it just does the first step which is the copying of the file, when it restart, it won't continue the process ??

i'm kinda lost, i would appreciate if you could shed some light in my question,

Thanks in advance
Eugene

Zitat von EugeneT im Beitrag #27

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...
Eugene

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Thanks Jan for your quick reply, I appreciate

I don't think it does support NVMe natively, there's no mention of NVMe anywhere in the manual.

For the modified BIOS, you mean you already had the modified BIOS file for this motherboard ?
You probly do, since you got the same motherboard....

On my side, i did try to update to the latest BIOS (3.3 version), thinking that would probly solve some issues, but no luck.

UPDATE:

I finally did the mod of the BIOS on my X9DAi, I kinda follow the procedure explain on that link: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.ph...-x9dri-f.13245/
which refer to this site for the modification of the BIOS: Recommended AHCI/RAID and NVMe Drivers
Everything went perfect, I can now boot from the NVMe 970 EVO Plus,
I'm using the Startech 3-Port M.2 NGFF SSD Adapter, i could have use the card with the single adapter, but it could be useful at a later date.... who knows
I haven't done any speed test on it yet which i should do later.

This site is great for all the infos and ressources, there's tons of info to grab from here.

Big thanks to JanCerny for your all your inputs, it was really helpful and appreciate

Eugene

The procedures for how to do that are here.

[Guide+Video] How to install windows on NVME SSD 960 EVO without clover on a board without NVMe support.

This is how I do mine and it works fine.