Installing M.2 NVMe* 80mm Drives on the Intel® Server Boards

Documentation

Install & Setup

000027813

06/08/2021

What is required when installing M.2 NVMe 80mm drives on the Intel® Server Boards?

It is required that:

  • AHCI Capable SATA Controller is set to AHCI.
  • Boot Mode is set to UEFI in BIOS.

It is expected behavior that any NVMe drive like the M.2 NVMe 80mm drive does not appear on BIOS as a boot device until you install an operating system. The operating system installer must be booted in UEFI mode. Booting in UEFI enables the installer to create an entry in the UEFI boot menu and create a UEFI system partition on the boot device that will contain the bootloaders of installed operating systems.

What happens at startup?

At startup, the boot manager searches the UEFI system partition for a valid operating system bootloader. This bootloader is then executed to load the operating system.

Note Always make sure your server system has the latest revision of your BIOS installed.

If the drive does not appear in BIOS:

  1. Try using another M.2 NVMe* 80mm drive to rule out a hardware problem.
  2. Try loading BIOS default settings. Data backup is recommended in case onboard RAID is configured.
  3. Replace the board because this can be caused by a defect in the board.
Note There is no driver required to install an operating system (OS) into an M.2 NVMe* drive on these server systems.