Crucial P5 M.2 2280 - PCIe Gen3 - No boot device found

I have a Crucial P5 1TB PCIe M.2 2280SS SSD (PCIe Gen 3) drive that I expected to use. Sure it’s not as fast as Gen 4, but I had it on hand. However, upon booting, the M2 drive is not detected. It’s not listed in the BIOS nor in the Boot Manager.

PCIe 3 & 4 are backwards and forwards compatible, so that shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve plugged the M2 into another PC; Windows boots and everything is visible.

Is there something blatant I’m missing? Thanks.

I have found that the M.2 is shown under the Security section of the BIOS, but that it is. There is not an EFI boot list.


  1. No it is not.

  2. Legacy, but it shouldn’t matter for the FWLT

  3. There shouldn’t be any problem with this. In an enterprise setting we move hard drives with different installs to all sorts of other machines. They may need some drivers installed, and windows takes longer to boot, but it comes up without an issue (largely)

  4. From looking at this thread: BIOS guide
    I do not see the “EFI Boot Order” option.

I also swapped in a blank Samsung 970 EVO (PCIe Gen 3.0 x4, NVMe 1.3) that I had on hand. It is not seen in the BIOS and I receive the same message

I found that the NVME appears under security, but nowhere else.

No. It’s an off the shelf Crucial M.2 that I had used in an older Dell laptop, it had bitlocker for a while but that caused problems so it was turned off. As I mentioned earlier the Samsung 970 doesn’t appear in the boot menu either.

Same Message: - “Default boot device missing or Boot failed”


I know it’s blank, but it should still appear in the UEFI as a selectable drive.
Again; The Crucial has a full Windows 10 load on the hard drive including the recovery partition & boot manager partitions. It doesn’t appear anywhere either.

Plenty of others in the community have had success with Gen3 drives. I listed it as an option if there were a known issue with not using PCIe Gen4 NVME’s.

:rofl:
The drive already has it installed. Why is an install needed? This is something I do multiple times daily.

Talk about unhelpful advice; “Something isn’t working, which is why you’re asking for support.”
Absolutely shocking, are you psychic?

I want to jump in and slow down this thread :slight_smile:

Just a reminder that everyone has good intentions in all directions, and it’s hard to convey that sometimes over the internet.

Hi Mr.Jeeves, sorry to hear about this issue. On the blank drive, note that it would not appear as a boot device until a bootable OS is installed onto it. On the drive that currently has an OS installed, note that it is possible that the actual boot record was on one of the other drives that was in the PC that you pulled it from. It often happens that you end up with boot records on one drive and the actual OS on another in multi-drive systems. To help debug this, it would be great to start with installing a fresh Windows 10 install onto the blank drive that you have on hand, so that we can be sure there isn’t any hardware issue at play.

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Appreciated :slight_smile:

The Crucial P5 is the boot drive, all others were storage only. If I start up any partition tools, I can see all the system reserved partitions.

Do you know for sure that the P5 is setup as GPT and not MBR?

One way to check is open diskpart from a command prompt then run list disk and if there is a * in the GPT column for the disk then it’s GPT.

I have tested this with a Rufus built USB boot.

The drive is GPT/NTFS. I have attempted basic BCD fixes (bootrec /FixMBR, bootrec /FixBoot, bootrec /ScanOS, bootrec /RebuildBCD) all to no avail. Windows Command prompt sees the drive w/all data.

Clearly this is an issue somewhere between Windows/InsydeH2O’s UEFI.

As noted; This was a booting/running drive prior to any tinkering.

I followed these steps, rebuilt the BCD store, no dice.

D: has \recovery, System Vol. Info
E: has the same, oddly enough.

BCDEdit shows the boot manager and boot loader, all appears correct. The only detail I see that stands out from some guides; There is not a FAT partition.

Here’s what I see for both.


Does it still boot on the old computer?

@Mr.Jeeves
FYI you will not see a drive in the boot manager unless the bios detects a valid EFI boot partition. This laptop does not support legacy boot.

The fact that you are seeing the drive show up in the storage manager means it is physically recognized and your drive and laptop are all ok. But there is no valid EFI boot partition (which would show up as a hidden fat32 partition on your existing SSD if it was present)

We would suggest following our windows setup guide and installing windows with a fresh install using a usb drive.

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Piggybacking on this thread - I have the same device, and the same issue, but it’s fresh out of the box as of today. The drive is recognized if I insert it in another machine, and I similarly can only see it listed in the security menu of the bios. I’ve tried installing several Linux distros and Win10, but I’ve had no luck getting any process to recognize it. Any tips or suggestions?

The guide needs to be updated to explain that alternative bootable creation tools such as Rufus require entering the bios to disable secure boot.

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