Aurora R10, cloned HDD to NVMe, boot from it?

Question

Hello everyone,

I have recently cloned my HDD drive on my Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 to an NVMe drive placed on the motherboard of the PC. I used the Alienware cloning utility within Support Assist (which you get to by pressing F12 when booting). All seems to have gone perfectly.

At this point, my objective is to get the NVMe drive to be recognized and booted to rather than the HDD drive. Also, my cloned drive (the NVMe drive) is appearing as the "D" drive currently. When I get the computer to boot to the NVMe drive I wish that drive to be recognized as the "C" drive.

Beyond that, I do not wish to remove my current HDD drive. I want it to become the "D" drive and be a completely new volume that is formatted and blank.

I am not aware of a way to do this within whatever programs are provided with the Alienware. If there is something that is included within the Alienware setup or support assist that allows me to do it, I would prefer to do it that way.

If on the other hand there is a process or method I need to follow in order to make all of these things happen, I'f be glad to know that instead.

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

Vanadiel · Accepted Answer

Everything is detailed in the R10 service manual: R10 service manual

What you are looking for is under Table 4. System setup options—Boot menu

If you have 2 bootable drives, both will be listed separately as UEFI boot partition in that drop down list.

Select the NVMe drive and it will boot from that drive moving forward. Boot drive when using UEFI is always designated drive letter "C", regardless of where it resides or what drive it is on. Your other drive will then be "D" and so on. You can change any drive letter using Windows Disk Management, except the "C" drive.

Vanadiel · Answer

You should be able to get into the motherboard BIOS and select the new NVMe drive as UEFI boot device. After that your HDD should become the D drive.

Digicoma · Answer

Thank you.

I guess what I'm looking for is specific instructions on how to find where that is and what the procedure is to finish out the job.

I have pressed F2 to enter the BIOS when powering on the computer, but I seem to be missing exactly where it is that I can set those parameters. In past BIOS's I'm familiar with (Like the XPS line going back a few years), the process was very straightforward and evident just by going in and looking for where to do this sort of procedure. I am no longer finding it "automatically" in this newer Alienware F2 setup.

If anyone could give me a step by step procedure of where to find what Vanadiel is talking about for my specific type of Alienware, I'd greatly appriciate it. I need to be able to find what they are talking about, and then I need to be able to have step by step instructions on what to do in order to make the switch to the NVMe drive so it is bootable, and recognized as the "C" drive.

While it would be great to know how to have such a utility switch the HDD drive to the "D" drive and allow me to make a new volume and format it, that is not neccesary. It would be appriciated, but not neccesary. I'll take whatever information I can get at least to make the NVMe drive the bootable one.

Thank you!!

steadler · Answer

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/backup-and-storage/restore-system-boot-drive-letter May be a solution, make sure you have a good backup.

Digicoma · Answer

Argentum,

Thank you for your reply. I will try this. I already have a complete (and tested) backup of the system; so restoring it should things go wrong will not be a problem.

My only question is if I do the steps listed in the Microsoft article you posted, will my Alienware then automatically know to boot from the NVMe drive.

The problem I'm having is that when I go into the BIOS, I can see both drives listed in certain dropdown menus. Nowhere do I see a way to manipulate which particular drive I want to be the boot drive.
Any BIOS I've ever been in has this process clearly available, and even has instructions on how to do it.

I am seeing no section whatsoever that allows me to choose which drive to boot from. I so see the ablility to either have the boot manager handle the "booting", or to have it boot from a USB, or from a NIC; but I would think there would be a specific "Boot Manager" I could get into and make my selection for which drive I want to boot from within it. I know I've got to be missing something. I wouldn't be suprised if it was obvious. I'm just not seeing it.

I apologize for continuing to ask for more specifics about where I'm to look to set the NVMe drive within the "Boot Manager" as the booting drive. I feel really stupid.

If doing what this Microsoft article will fix it all, great. I'm just worried though that it will flip the drive letters, but that the BIOS will still think the HDD is the drive it should boot and not the NVMe.

Thanks for any further clarification you can provide.

Digicoma · Answer

Excellent! Thank you. I am sorry I didn't know where that was listed. I will go over it, try the process, and if it works, then I'll close this issue as resolved. I'm sure it will be, I just need to make sure I get through this successfully before I call it a closed case.

Thank you though! Thank you!

Digicoma · Answer

Just to update, Vanadielhad the solution. It would have been apparent to me from the get go, but there was no drop down apparent. One had to go in to "Choose a File" option within Table 4, then find the boot file and make a specific name for it which is saved in the BIOS. I did this.
Once this is done, the options you can pick are, "Boot Manager", a NIC, another NIC, and finally whatever name you gave for the specific boot file which resides on a specific drive.
I chose the name I gave rather than the other selections. After hitting save and reboot, the NVMe drive was the boot drive and all was well.

Like I had said before, the fact that I needed to find a boot file on the drive from within the BIOS, and actually name it (as opposed to having a dropdown with the drive name to be chosen as a C drive or a D drive) was very confusing to me. Everything has always just had a name and has been availible to choose on any other BIOS I've worked on. I guess this is no longer the case. Nonetheless, I have learned from this experience and appriciate all the help I was given which led to the problem being solve.

Sincere thanks!

Alienware Desktops

Aurora R10, cloned HDD to NVMe, boot from it?

Was this post helpful?