Boot to optane drive?

[TOnto]

I have a dell that can take an optane M.2 board and that works fine either as enabled optane memory speeding up main drive access, or disabled in that mode and just formated as a D: drive. I would like to do a clean windows install to the optane drive. When I remove the SATA drive and boot a windows install stick it say sit can't find any drive to install windows on. Why not?

[idata]

Hi Techontop ,

We understand your situation regarding the Windows* installation. Just to clarify, are you trying to install Windows* on the drive? or are you trying to install Windows* on the Intel® Optane™ Memory?We look forward to hearing back from you.Regards,Junior M.

[CFord2]

He's trying to install Windows onto/into the Optane M.2 drive.

...and is having difficulty with windows recognizing the Optane module.

I would: Make sure your motherboard is NVMe ready and update to the latest bios. Then:

1) Leave your older boot drive with Windows installed in place and [Install the Optane M.2] as a storage drive and [Format the Optane M.2] to GPT and then NTFS.

2) Then power down and remove your older OS drive, move the (now formatted) Optane M.2 to your desired OS boot drive position, add your Windows 10 USB drive and force boot in your bios to USB UEFI Windows installation.

When properly formatted first, your Optane M.2 should be available and recognized in your bios AND during Windows 10 install.

I used this simple two step method above to run an Optane M.2 32GB module for a few months as a OS/boot drive and also the same two step method a few days ago with my new Intel 900P SSD.

Good Luck!

[TOnto]

Well that wasn't exactly what worked but it got me on the right track. I had to reformat it as MBR and play with boot up UEFI/Legacy etc but finally got Win Install to see it and install there. Very fast. Thanks for the tips.