Z68AP-D3, howto boot from PCIe M.2 SSD on Windows 10 on and old system

[NaturligaRussin]

I have manage to clone my old SATA SSD to the new drive, a Kingston A2000 M.2 SSD.
Windows 10 recognizes the drive when booting from the old drive, but I can't unplug the old drive and make the PC boot.
I have tried different bios settings, but there are a lot of UEFI settings not sure how they are supposed to be selected.

Also  Windows 10 boots through MBR. Maybe it needs to be converted to GPT for things to work, but I want to check if anybody has managed to get an old MB like this to boot from a PCIe drive first.
Worried that I will not be able to go back if things go wrong…

Upgraded the Z68AP-D3 (v2.0) MB with the latest rev UA9 (UEFI BIOS).

[NaturligaRussin]

It seems like this motherboard is too old, just got the reply back from GigaByte. Short, but to the point

Answer:   
  Hello,

  Sorry but this board doesn't support boot from the PCIE SSD.

  9/8/2020 1:37 PM

Also got this on a follow up question:

Question:   Thanks for the quick reply.
I guess the BIOS does not have full UEFI compliance?

Is there any GigaByte motherboard for Intel socket 1155 LGA that supports boot, since I would like to keep the processor?   9/8/2020 3:33 PM
Answer:   
  Hello,

  We have check the Intel Z68 and Z77 Chipset motherboard doesn't support boot from PCIE SSD.

  Intel Z87 and Z97 motherboard support it but the CPU socket is 1150.

-------------
So I guess Z87 or Z97 if I want to keep my i7 2600K

[shadowsports]

Greetings,
You've already received your answer.  Not possible with this MB, Chipset and BIOS.  With a board that old, its time for a upgrade Z390/490. 

[NaturligaRussin]

Greetings,
You've already received your answer.  Not possible with this MB, Chipset and BIOS.  With a board that old, its time for a upgrade Z390/490. 

Noooo.....I am not ready!!! 

But I wonder why the BIOS update to UEFI on this 1155 motherboard?

Also, I can always use my old SATA SSD to boot Windows 10 from, and install all programs on the PCIE SSD. Booting will still be slow but everything else should be faster....

[dmdilks]

But thing is you can't really use that drive in that card to you get to a Z170 board. Any thing before that you taking a chance that it might not work. The Z170 board really was the 1st board to support M.2 NVMe drives.

Does your card have 2 ports. One sata & the other PCie ports on the card. If it does you can get the other M.2 drive with the 2 slot and use that one. The SSD you have only has one slot. Plus you can only use in just PCie port too.

So if you want a M.2 drive like I said get the one with 2 slots. Now you are working with a sata cable and not a PCie slots. Yes you are still in the PCie slot but you running it like a sata drive.

The z68 & z77 are both 1155 socket. What really happen why the Z68 got a Bios update to support UEFI. Is because people were crying we want UEFi like the Z77 boards. It was really not that great on the Z68 boards.

Plus one more thing is that i7-2600 doesn't really support UEFI sorry. That is a Sandy bridge CPU. The Ivy Bridge was the first CPU to support UEFI & 3.0 video cards. 

[NaturligaRussin]

No, it does seem to be the case that PCI SSD OS boot is not an option, but the bios settings seems to indicate that it is!?
(Boot Mode Selection)
(Sorry for the unclear pictures, the forum only allows me to post 2 small ones)

[NaturligaRussin]

And this
(Storage boot option control)

[NaturligaRussin]

And possibly this one
(Other PCI device ROM priority)

[shadowsports]

NaturligaRussin,
You're missing the point, but I'm not going to argue it with you.  UEFI doesn't not mean supports boot from m.2.  Support for this was not implemented on this board.  It doesn't matter what kind of card or adapter you have or want to use. 

You are welcome to spend your time trying to figure something out that was never intended to work.  I've been in your position many times, and learned long ago its not worth it.  The chipset is 9+ years old, not vintage or classic.  I'll leave it at that.   

In the end, your time (which is valuable) could have been spent on a newer system that supports your intended use case.  This is not an attempt to disparage your efforts, just pointing out the reality of things.  You are welcome to do as you wish.  I wish you luck in this endeavor.