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Booting from M.2 on HP EB 840 G2 (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by s38b35M5@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Anyone have experience getting an HP EliteBook 840 G2 to boot from M.2? There's only one setting in BIOS to enable it, and it's enabled by default. Latest BIOS update. It's in the boot order. It's even seen when pressing F9 for boot options. I see MX23 but no grub (under legacy) or EFI files found in the ESP partition (under UEFI).

I've tried cloning my functional SSD install with dd and clonezilla with no errors, but both result in no boot disk found. Same with a fresh install to the drive from live USB.

I've moved through full legacy, to hybrid, full UEFI, but none see the device as bootable after install.

Loading GRUB or Syslinux and attempting to boot from HD also fails to boot from the M.2.

TIA

Edit: added clarification what was being cloned

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[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago

Is it a full m.2 drive or that intel hybrid drive setup? if it is the hybrid drive I believe you can change from raid to ahci, to alter how drives are seen.

Was m.2 working on the machine prior? m.2 form factor sata is different than m.2 form factor nvme drive.

Also HP can be fussy about what drive sizes are supoorted, the user manual will list some drives that work

[-] s38b35M5@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the reply.

This is the drive I picked up. It's a bog standard tiny M.2 drive that will fit in my laptop.

I have my controller set to AHCI mode. The drive is seen, as I can install MX Linux or Mint to it, but it won't boot. Same with Clonezilla or dd, which can see the drive just fine to copy data to it. The option to boot from PCIe/M.2 is enabled. Toggling it changes nothing in any case.

When I press F9 for boot options after removing the 2.5" SSD, I can see the boot option named as "MX23" or "Mint" (depending on which I've just installed or cloned), but selecting it does nothing, unfortunately.

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago

That drive says it is nvme protocol, It is possible the 840 G2 BIOS doesn't support m2 nvme booting, only m2 sata protocol booting.

I have an old Dell machine like this.

There are blogs on the steps to take a blob from an nvme BIOS ROM and patch it into your HP G2 firmware, but it can be risky.

Changing to a true sata m.2 might solve it.

There are a couple of samsung older drives 850 series maybe, that have a built in option ROM boot portion, to get around tgis BIOS issue

[-] s38b35M5@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks for that insight. The hard thing is that getting things from Amazon or other web stores in Central America where I live is not easy. I ordered this drive in November and received it two weeks ago. I was sure it would work, as my G3 laptop came from the factory with a M.2 Kingston drive, so I assumed NVME was a no-brainer.

The real kicker is that this was planned as a gift to my partner who has the same laptop, but with a Toshiba HDD. Boot time >2 min, vs 17s on my SSD, and even faster (theoretically) on this M.2. Sigh... poor prep on my part.

Thanks again for the kind help. I had no idea.

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago

As a side note you can put the efi boot partition on a hdd during install, but the OS on the NVME. it will boot up quick

[-] s38b35M5@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I may go down that road, but the main push was to remove the almost ten year old platter based magnetic drive. Maybe I'll look into placing the ESP on a flash drive until I have a better solution. Bummer. This secret upgrade to breathe new life into my partner's laptop isn't going well at all.

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago

I feel the pain. I went through the same with my Dell system. I found somebody selling a cheap industrial sata 2.5 ssd that had good consistent read speed, and threw that in for the boot partition, and nvme for everything else. Disappointing but bootup is stil quick in the 30-35 seconds instead of minutes

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 8 months ago

That is dissappointing. If you search you might find somone that has already modified the BIOS image. or has an Option ROM available. You should see load option ROM as a BIOS option. But you never with the interwebs to know if the download firmware image it will brick your system or be some malware.

[-] s38b35M5@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

I'll do some research on this front to see what I find. Thanks

this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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