Installing Windows on a board with multiple M.2 slots

Flight · 2 Dec 2020 at 11:08

Fresh build, all brand new hardware, 2 x M.2 NVME drives. Motherboard is MSI MAG B550M Mortar (AMD AM4) B550.

Do I need to only put one M.2 drive in until after I've installed Windows ?

MikeTimbers · 2 Dec 2020 at 17:56

That's probably the best way, yes.

Deleted member 77746 · 2 Dec 2020 at 18:07

Always best to remove second storage so you know for sure;

A) You install it on the right drive.
B) You don't wipe the wrong drive.

The reason I say this is I have wiped 700gb of data before by selecting the wrong drive. I have also installed the OS to a wrong drive with no data on it by not removing it.

Rroff · 2 Dec 2020 at 18:09

Agree with the above - Windows can do funny things when it comes to writing the system stuff to disc - it is always best to install with just the OS drive in place and add the rest in once you are done with the main OS install process.

djxput · 3 Dec 2020 at 13:10

Bouton Aide said:
Always best to remove second storage so you know for sure;

A) You install it on the right drive.
B) You don't wipe the wrong drive.

The reason I say this is I have wiped 700gb of data before by selecting the wrong drive. I have also installed the OS to a wrong drive with no data on it by not removing it.

Ouch that would have not been good. Thanks for the heads up.

Deleted member 77746 · 3 Dec 2020 at 13:32

djxput said:
Ouch that would have not been good. Thanks for the heads up.

Wasn't really important data, was just throw away data collected over a number of years. It's why I don't bother collecting it now. All important stuff gets kept backed up remotely.

smogsy · 5 Dec 2020 at 06:58

Flight said:
Fresh build, all brand new hardware, 2 x M.2 NVME drives. Motherboard is MSI MAG B550M Mortar (AMD AM4) B550.

Do I need to only put one M.2 drive in until after I've installed Windows ?

easiest way is to have your OS drive a different size to all others eg 128GB vs 256GB.

that way when you see the partitions in the installer you can do quick maths to workout the right drive

eg
Drive 0 Partition 1 100G
Drive 0 Partition 2 200G

Or if empty
Drive 0 128GB
Drive 1 256GB

this is how i always do OS drives

I now the following NVME Drives:
256GB OS drive
3x Samsung 970 1TB
2x WD 2TB

Kaotc · 5 Dec 2020 at 16:33

ive got the same motherboard and hadnt considered windows wouldnt be able to differentiate between the two, so thanks for the heads up! (still waiting on me damn CPU though...)

andy_mk3 · 5 Dec 2020 at 16:36

Always used to be the way to do it, but since using Windows 10, I have never once had an issue with it using another drive. It used to be an issue in the XP/Vista/7 days where it would put system files on another drive and then wouldn't boot when you removed it. I swap and change drives around a fair bit and it's never once caused a problem on 10.

pc-guy · 5 Dec 2020 at 20:03

Never had problems with multiple drives installed. I can understand if the drives are all the same and the risk of mistaken identity but even that is slim. The one with data in it will have partition information so you know what it is.