Question Is my NVME drive corrupted? All I did was move cases!!!

[aleader]

I recently moved to my new Fractal Design Meshify C case. Win 10, ASUS Z97 Pro Gamer LGA 1150 board with a WD M2 NVME blue drive (500GB) as my system drive, GTX 1070.

Moved everything over, but did make a few changes. First I think I switched SATA connectors around on my 2.5 SSD and WD 1TB HDD when re-hooking them. I also moved my vid card to the 2nd PCI Express slot so it wouldn't block my SATA ports like it does in the 1st slot. I also must have flipped my power supply to 'ECO' mode when I was putting it in.

I should mention too that I switched out my Kingston HyperX 1866 16GB to my son's so that I could use an extra 8GB that I had lying around. Switched it with his G SKill 16GB and the extra 2x4GB G Skill for a total of 24GB, all same timings (1600, 9-9-9-24, different colours though).

I booted up, and it just kept power cycling on/off without posting. At first I thought I'd forgot to hook up the CPU power, but that wasn't it, so I checked the PSU and flipped the ECO mode off. Restarted again and it seemed to post ok, but then gave me a warning that O/C won't work (or something) and it reset my settings in the BIOS (I have a 4670K O/C to 4.4GHz for the last 3 years, stock fan) and sent me to the BIOS menu. Messed around for a while with it and restarted several times. Sometimes it would post, other times nothing and I'd have to hit the reset switch. Noticed two options for my NVME in the boot menu...one to boot from 'WD Boot Manager' and the other was the drive itself. I couldn't recall seeing that before, but it's been a while since I've been in the BIOS.

Long story short, I did get into Windows eventually, but things were very slow and choppy. I reset the BIOS to defaults and did get back in and it seems ok now, but my disk now look like the below image. I should only have C (NVME), D (1TB WD HDD), and E (250GB SSD). I did move the SATA drives away from SATA 4 as the manual says it disables that one when the M2 is enabled, and I moved my GPU back to the first slot as I suspect it may use the 2nd slot for the M2 drive when the express option is enabled for the M2 drive in the BIOS.

Would SATA 4 not matter with an NVME drive? Did the system get corrupted? Do I now need to wipe it and re-install windows or is there a fix? Thanks.

 

[Mr Evil]

That looks normal for a drive that has had Windows 10 installed on it. Windows likes to create a couple of small partitions for its mysterious purposes.

 

[aleader]

Yah, you're right. I'm feeling like chicken-little over here . I checked my laptop and it has even more partitions on the M2 SSD. My biggest issue right now is the performance as it's taking a lot longer to boot, but could that be the RAM? I'm now thinking before I swapped RAM I should have went into the BIOS first and set everything back to default (removed the O/C).

I always assume that it will auto-detect everything, but maybe dropping to a slower RAM forced it into something it didn't like. I noticed the MB is recognizing all 24GB, but the 2x4 set only at 1333, not 1600, so everything's at 1333. When I try to force 1600 or select the XMP setting the system won't boot. Weird as it's essentially the same RAM.

I'm going to swap the RAM back and see if it fixes everything. I think I disabled Fast Boot too, but surely that wouldn't make it boot 10 times slower on an NVME drive?

 

[Muadib]

I'm going to swap the RAM back and see if it fixes everything. I think I disabled Fast Boot too, but surely that wouldn't make it boot 10 times slower on an NVME drive?

I also disabled Fast Boot, and yes booting is extremely slow. I plan to turn it back on when I'm done with my memory I'm waiting for.

 

[aleader]

I switched the Kingston ram back in and it right away detected it at 1866 and I was able to put my O/C profile back on, but something is still off. Now when I boot there is a white cursor bouncing all over the screen and then the Windows 'wheel' as it loads and then to my login screen. It used to go straight from the ASUS logo to the login screen in about 2 secs. Now it takes about 15 secs. I may have to boot from the USB and try a repair and see what happens. Does it make any difference in the BIOS whether you boot directly from the NVME drive or from the UEFI boot manager (those are the 2 options on the first summary screen)? I'm assuming the boot manager is that 99MB 'EFI System Partition'?

 

[aleader]

I switched the Kingston ram back in and it right away detected it at 1866 and I was able to put my O/C profile back on, but something is still off. Now when I boot there is a white cursor bouncing all over the screen and then the Windows 'wheel' as it loads and then to my login screen. It used to go straight from the ASUS logo to the login screen in about 2 secs. Now it takes about 15 secs. I may have to boot from the USB and try a repair and see what happens. Does it make any difference in the BIOS whether you boot directly from the NVME drive or from the UEFI boot manager (those are the 2 options on the first summary screen)? I'm assuming the boot manager is that 99MB 'EFI System Partition' shown above in disk management?

 

[Muadib]

Are you on the latest BIOS for your motherboard?

 

[kornphlake]

It could be the M.2 drive is slower because it is sharing bandwidth with the graphics card or SATA port. From the manual:

M.2 Socket 3 shares bandwidth with PCIEx1_1 & PCIEx1_2 (in PCIE mode) and SATA6G_4 (in SATA mode), and supports M Key and type 2260/2280 storage devices. Refer to section 2.6.3 PCH Storage Configuration and 2.6.7 Onboard Device Configuration of this user guide for more details.

Also the recommended slot for a single graphics card is the grey slot, you may not be getting full performance from your graphics card in the other slot, although it is marked 16x, the manual is kind of vague, it looks like the second slot supports a 16x graphics card mechanically but only operates at 8x.

In single VGA card mode, use the PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16_1 slot (gray) for a PCI Express x16 graphics card to get better performance

Move the SATA connectors and graphics cards back to their original places and try again.

 

[aleader]

It could be the M.2 drive is slower because it is sharing bandwidth with the graphics card or SATA port. From the manual:



Also the recommended slot for a single graphics card is the grey slot, you may not be getting full performance from your graphics card in the other slot, although it is marked 16x, the manual is kind of vague, it looks like the second slot supports a 16x graphics card mechanically but only operates at 8x.


Move the SATA connectors and graphics cards back to their original places and try again.

Thanks, I did all that already (in my first post). I think my issues were all RAM-related as it stopped when I switched the mixed RAM out and went back to my HyperX memory. The only thing that still bugs me is that it seems to take a few seconds longer now to boot...yah, we're spoiled now . The post screen comes up (delay of 3 secs) then it switches to the large ASUS logo and the spinning windows circles, and then the login. I'm wondering if there's some boot setting in the BIOS I need to switch? I'll have to play around with it.

 

[aleader]

Are you on the latest BIOS for your motherboard?

Surprisingly, no. I thought I was but was one behind. The 'newest' one is from 2016. Oddly, when I did update it, I was able to O/C the CPU a little more and lower the voltage substantially from where it was. I'm derailing my own thread here, but I was at 4.3GHz (typo in my first post...said 4.4) at 1.265 VCore to get it stable. Been playing that way for 3 years.

I now have it set stable to 4.4GHz at 1.185VCore. That's a pretty substantial drop in voltage. Same stock cooler, the only thing that's different is Windows 10 now (upgraded a few months ago from Win 7) and the BIOS update. Could moving from Win 7 to 10 account for it? The BIOS changes from 2202 to 2203 seemed pretty inconsequential, but did say it was for 'stability improvements'. Can't really prove which it was now, but I'm curious.