I've just got my hands on a Dell Vostro 3268 workstation with an i5-7400 processor and 12GB of DDR4 RAM, running on an Intel H110 chipset. It came with a SATA SSD already installed. I decided to add a PCIe adapter in the x16 slot and installed a 256GB Samsung NVME drive, where I successfully installed Windows 11. However, when I try to boot up the PC, I get an error saying 'no bootable device.' I've already updated the BIOS to the latest version (1.26.0). The installation is set to UEFI, but the NVME drive doesn't show up in the BIOS drive list, and the boot options only list Windows Boot Manager. Interestingly, Clover can detect and boot from the drive. Is there any method to get the BIOS to recognize this drive? When I attempt to add a boot device in UEFI, it states that no file system is found. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!
2 Answers
You might try checking the motherboard specifications to confirm if it supports NVME boot. If there's no specific setting for UEFI or NVME in the BIOS, then upgrading to the latest firmware might be your only option. Sometimes older boards just don’t have that capability.
It sounds like you've hit a wall with booting from the NVME drive. Many BIOS versions, especially on older hardware, might not support booting from a PCIe NVME drive at all. If your BIOS doesn't have settings for NVME booting, it's likely that you can only use the SSD as a data drive, not as a boot device. You might want to check the Dell support community for specifics about your model.
I checked, and there are no NVME-related options available in the BIOS. It's disappointing, but thanks for the tip!