Questions about GIGABYTE products > Motherboards with Intel processors

Gigabyte AMI UEFI BIOS : M.2 drive name never appears in F12 Menu

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thestarman333:
I hope someone can provide a link to where I first saw this issue posted for another Gigabyte motherboard! I tried image searching, but that was a waste of time!
My data: "B460M DS3H V2" motherboard, 25Q series flash memory, 256M bits BIOS, was at F20, but updated to F23 to see if that made any difference; it did _not_. Same issue for both BIOS chip code.

PROBLEM: The name of my M.2 (NVMe) device never appears in the F12 boot menu; but if I click on the correct EMPTY (blank) selection slot, it will boot up from that device!  That was a big problem at first, never seeing the M.2 drive and the PC always booting to a SATA hdd instead; unless I removed them and had only the NVMe drive installed. At least I can now find ways to boot from the NVMe drive! ;-)

I believe this issue stems from some kind of perverted illogical person (or a manager who refused to have AMI BIOS do the code correctly for some cost overrun?) giving precedence to the SATA ports instead of the M.2 (NVMe) port!  Who in their right mind would think someone purchasing a motherboard with both SATA and M.2 ports would do so because they wanted to always boot from a SATA drive instead of the M.2 drive first?!?!?

Another curious quirk for both the F20 and F23 version of this BIOS: If you look under the Easy Mode, you will see the M.2 drive name correctly under the "M.2" button, and sometimes you can even get it to appear in the Boot Order menu in that BIOS screen.... BUT when I try booting that way for the first time, the board will always choose to boot from one of the SATA drives!!  And when I use the F12 boot menu, the M.2 drive name is never there... I have to click on or use keyboard to select the empty / blank slot that I had learn was actually for my M.2 drive!

Oh, lastly, I found a way to "disable" SATA drives from the Advanced Boot Order, but again, empty slot in F12 menu.

I'm starting to think that the intelligent people who used to work at Gigabyte (and/or AMI BIOS?) have all left the company (or sadly died).

shadowsports:
Greetings,
The F12 one time boot menu is not intended to be used as a Boot Manager.  Unexpected behavior can result.

That said.  it may be helpful if you provide more background about your system, install and hardware config. 
Did this ever work?
Windows 10 or 11?
Has the drive ever appeared properly in BIOS?
In the one time boot menu (F12)?
Did you perform a fresh install of your OS to the m.2 or was the disk migrated from another system?
If a fresh install was performed did you provide a driver?
How was the m.2 formatted?  MBR or GPT?  Did you use diskpart during windows set up?
The issue may very well be BIOS related...
or
I suspect the above may reveal the issue

Will await your answers.

thestarman333:
Hello shadowsports,

   To be clear: I didn't mean that I need to use F12 every single time I boot the PC; once I click on the empty slot in the F12 boot menu, it will boot from the M.2 drive on the next boot-up. But it took many tries to finally figure out that's what I had to do (see the picture I attached to initial post above). It basically comes down to the fact that GIGABYTE decided (somehow) to give priority to the SATA drives, AND HAS AN ERROR that even when I selected the M.2 drive as the first boot drive, it still would not make it so until AFTER I used the F12 menu to select the empty (no name) slot that booted it up!

   UPDATE: As I mentioned in my post, I finally found a setting to DISABLE booting from any SATA drives; which I suppose would be GIGABYTE's answer to this problem they created. I didn't need to go into the F12 menu again, PC has booted-up fine since doing that, but for thoroughness, I just did it again, and now the M.2 drive actually appears in the menu; with no SATA drive names! For the record, I have never seen the M.2 drive name appear with the SATA drive names at the same time.  (See new attached photo here.)

Dan, TheStarman.

Afterthought: Can't help wondering if the two empty slots in current boot menu would boot the SATA drives. Hahaha.

dmdilks:
I might be wrong but what is happening here is you have other drives with the windows boot manager. What you have to do is if you want the M.2 to have a boot manager you have to disconnect the other 2 drives.

What is happening is when you installed the M.2 drive and installed windows on it. That drive is using the boot manager. from one of the other drives. I thought windows had fix that but I see it didn't.

To fix it right you have to start over on the M.2 drive. Do a clean install on it. Disconnect the 2 other drives. When you get to where see the M.2 drive delete all partition. Then click on New and that will setup the drive. Once it is done you should have 3 drives with boot manager on them. Then you should be able boot from it in the bios.

shadowsports:
Greetings,
This is the direction I was heading in, but didn't want to speculate on how the m.2 drive was set up. 

Since the questions did not get answered, there are still too many unknowns as to the cause.

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