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I bought a new m.2 pcie 3.0 1TB ssd for my laptop from Samsung, and it works for storing and transferring files from Debian.

But it doesn't show up in the BIOS, and I cannot boot from it. What could be the problem?

Laptop: Asus ROG G751JY

SSD: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08TJ2649W

(i actually ordered it a second time to see if it was a fault with the ssd, but the second one didn't show up either. Same for the one I had before. I just one day reinstalled and it broke, idk what happened tbh)

User1986
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1 Answers1

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The BIOS on such old machines has no notion of NVMe storage, which is what your drive is. You won't be able to boot directly from it with an old machine. Linux doesn't need support from the BIOS to use it normally once it's booted.

What you can do, if you wish, is keep a SATA drive with a small (less than 1GB) bootable partition mounted as /boot and with grub installed there, while the OS and other files are on the NVMe drive.

In case your system boots in UEFI mode, the EFI system partition containing grub (and possibly other loaders) must also exist on the boot drive visible to the BIOS.

Related discussion: https://superuser.com/questions/1782009/can-grub-access-an-nvme-drive-when-the-bios-lacks-support-for-it

jms
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    I have an old (2013) computer in this situation: no BIOS support for NVME, some support for EFI. I tried to only have grub on a SATA drive to boot the OS on the NVME drive, but couldn't get it to work, because apparently grub doesn't know how to access an NVME drive without BIOS support. – jms Oct 19 '23 at 16:42
  • Okay Clarification: A NVME SSD once showed up in the BIOS I installed Ubuntu onto it everything worked for 1 year I decide to install debian, now ssd gone from BIOS :( buy new ssd Problem persists – User1986 Oct 19 '23 at 17:04
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    @jms hmm interesting. Okay in any case then it may be worth noting in this answer that for UEFI it will need both /boot and EFI on the sata. – Philip Couling Oct 19 '23 at 17:17
  • @User1986 I don't think the drive you saw in the BIOS was an NVME drive, rather it was likely an M.2 SATA drive. M.2 is the physical connector, and it can be used for SATA drives (which your BIOS can detect) and for NVME drives (which it cannot). – jms Oct 19 '23 at 19:55
  • @PhilipCouling As I understand it, the situation is exactly the same with MBR or EFI, no? – jms Oct 19 '23 at 19:56
  • EFI setups typically have two patitions typically mounted as /boot and /boot/EFI the latter is interpreted by the BIOS, and by convention not the same as /boot. But as you just pointed out, grub needs /boot. With legacy boot, the EFI partition doesn't exist and the BIOS reads the first few KB of the main HD ignoring partition table and file system. So UEFI needs an extra partition. – Philip Couling Oct 19 '23 at 20:12
  • @PhilipCouling AFAIK having a separate /boot is rarely needed, and I've never heard it is recommended, whether booting EFI or MBR. In the particular context of this question, a dedicated /boot is my suggestion to boot the OS on the NVME drive, but I am not certain if it's what the OP needs in the end. An EFI partition is needed if the system boots with EFI, but that is not specified here. If I were to boot with EFI in this case, my preference would be to have a single EFI-formatted partition that also contains /boot, because I don't see a benefit in having one more mostly empty partition. – jms Oct 19 '23 at 20:33
  • @jims "seperate boot" is not seperate to EFI. It's seperate to root "/". In this exact context a seperate boot is required as you pointed out. Combining EFI with /boot is possible I've done it but it's incredibly rare because you end up with a FAT32 /boot which some things choke on when they try to make sym links. Ultimately it's your answer, but it would be better to be explicit on these topics. – Philip Couling Oct 19 '23 at 21:31
  • Funny for me that you mention these symlinks, as I was discussing them with a friend recently. What uses them nowadays? I mean, I see their value if I want to add static grub entries referring to a moving kernel version, but otherwise I let kernel updates run update-grubfor me. Are there other uses for these symlinks? As for the EFI case, I'll mention it. – jms Oct 19 '23 at 22:57
  • Not a lot. In context of this question though it's unclear what may break. Packaging scripts (apt) etc may fail if they can't be created. – Philip Couling Oct 20 '23 at 09:19