[SUCCESS] Booting 950 Pro NVMe on GA‑Z77X‑UP5 TH

[Westsurf]

Do you have the correct settings in BIOS to see the UEFI drives since updating the BIOS?

I’d suggest to load default settings and then review all BIOS settings to ensure they’re all set correctly. Best not to load a past BIOS config.

 

[ultrahypnotiq]

Thanks

Do you have the correct settings in BIOS to see the UEFI drives since updating the BIOS?

I’d suggest to load default settings and then review all BIOS settings to ensure they’re all set correctly. Best not to load a past BIOS config.

Thanks for the suggestion, I really appreciate you taking the time to comment. If I may ask, are the BIOS settings for our exact board on the forum, forgive me if I missed them?

 

[Westsurf]

Yes best to review https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...-build-i5-3570k-ga-z77x-up5-th-gtx-760.73112/

In this thread you’ll also see the various people who have undertaken this NvME upgrade including me.

Having a guess is that your BIOS update didn’t occur as expected and / or your system may have defaulted to the back up BIOS.

 

[Westsurf]

I have the identical motherboard and have loaded the modded BIOS F12 but my NVMe SSD is not showing up. No UEFI Hard Drive is in the new BIOS. Is there a reason why the modded BIOS is not seeing the NVMe SSD PCie with PCIE in the suggested slot location?

This is where I think the issue may be ... there is a section in the BIOS that determines whether boot drives are UEFI or Legacy.

I think your issue may lie there if you don’t see any UEFI drives

 

[ultrahypnotiq]

I'm going to check it out and again many thanks.

 

[Nortagawa]

Hi all,

Pleasantly surprised to see activity on this thread, as I have my old Z77X-UP5-TH Hackintosh up and running with 10.15 Catalina. Thank you all for getting me this far!

I didn't see that someone had ever posted a version of the old mod9_12j from TweakTown. I extracted the three NVMe modules from @danmcq 's original BIOS patch, then applied them to the original 12j image. Seems to boot just fine for me, as I can see my 970 Evo Plus in the System Info:

Given the recent news about Apple's move to ARM, I hope this is useful to anyone bringing their old Z77X-UP5-TH builds into modernity, for as long as we can.

 

[Westsurf]

This may be a stretch but I’m wondering if anyone is having issues using Opencore on the GA-Z77X UP5 TH MB?

Since upgrading to 0.6.7 the issue seems that the MB cannot use the EFI from any other drive to boot other than the installed NvME drive despite overriding in BIOS or via F12 to select boot drive at startup.

This seems to be confirmed as when the NvME drive (which like all of us is on a PCie card) is removed any other OC based drive returns a unable to boot / insert bootable media error.

It was working previously or I wouldn’t have been able to install OC Big Sur off a USB drive To a test SSD (not NvME). The NvME main drive runs Mojave.

An associated problem seems that I am locked out of resetting / clearing NVRAM excepting via the CMD+OPT+P+R at OSX start up. I am unsure if this is contributing factor to the boot issue. I raise this issue as when updating OC from 0.6.6 to 0.6.7 the updated OC wasn’t recognised until a NVRAM reset occurred which was done with the OC picker and boot EFI occurred via a 0.6.7 OC test USB. That EFI folder was eventually transferred to the NvME SSD main drive.

The issues were realised when trying to update OC to 0.6.8.

I‘m wondering if it may be due to some interaction between the modded BIOS, a NVRAM setting, and changes with the 0.6.8 Opencore? Yet I may be clutching at straws.

Any help or ideas gratefully accepted.

@Nortagawa as your the last person with BIOS editing skills to reply to this thread I’d hope you Would have some insight.

 

[aquarc]

I know this thread is old, but it comes up in all search engines about NVMe support for older mobos and I just struggled for almost a day to get it to work.

The first post and most (if not all) other posts I found on the web are missing a key set of requirements:

Your NVMe disk *must* be GPT (not MBR) and *must* have a FAT32 partition marked ESP (EFI) and also Bootable at the beginning of the disk.

If you don't do that, then you won't see the disk in the BIOS to choose from at boot, no matter what you try.

Simply converting your MBR disk to GPT will not be sufficient for the BIOS to show the NVMe disk in the boot list. After you create the FAT32 partition, you can use all sort of tools to "repair" your boot, depending on the OS. For Windows there are a ton that you can run from a bootable UEFI USB stick (must be UEFI!), including the native bootbcd, or Macrium, etc.

Perhaps @danmcq can add this info to the 1st post.

My story: I had a 512GB ssd initialized as MBR (I always avoided UEFI as it always gave me headaches). I cloned that SSD onto my newly purchased Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe.

 

[backinblackx86]

Might this modified BIOS work for the GA-Z77X-UD5H ?

 

[Westsurf]

Might this modified BIOS work for the GA-Z77X-UD5H ?

Unlikely albeit you may wish to go through the thread and contact @Nortagawa or @danmcq ?

I was originally helped by them to mod a BIOS for a different motherboard.

In the end you could also look up how to inspect edit BIOS and find which Intel Nvme portion is needed to get a MB to recognize a NVMe drive.