Booting from M.2 on HP EB 840 G2
Booting from M.2 on HP EB 840 G2
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
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
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.
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