Solved Lost access to BIOS after adding a 2nd M.2 SSD

Megahertz said:

Only MBR has a limit of 4 Primary partitions and (using a 512-byte sectors) a drive size of 2.2T (one or multi partitions)

Master boot record - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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I can only speak from personal experience. Here is MS community link addressing this problem:

My friend, who is light years ahead of me in his knowledge and expertise, had an old SATA II Seagate external hard drive. He could not get it to keep the full 3TB as a single partition until he converted it to GPT. However, it kept on reverting back to 2.2 TB and leaving the rest unallocated even after he converted the drive to GPT. It refused to hold the configuration. I was perplexed about it as I had not heard of such a thing before. I dismissed it as an anomaly.

About a year later, I had a WD "My Book" that began to behave the same way but it was 4TB. Converting it to GPT made no difference. I could go through the process but it would always revert to an unallocated partition. So the problem wasn't in Seagate architecture or design and it wasn't exclusive to Western Digital external hard drives either. The problem is with older mechanical hard drives. Since then I've run into this issue many times, especially with older WD "My Book" type drives and my solution to the problem is to break open the enclosure and remove the drive from the bridge (which often goes defective anyway) and pop it into a newer external enclosure. I still have an old WD drive like this and even with the replacement enclosure and after converting to GPT it won't keep the partitions unless I limit them to 2TB. That has been my personal experience. Key words: Older hard drives.

kanenas said:

You said GPT handles only up to 3TB partitions?!

I had no idea that GPT is also limited with such low partition sizes (in today's disk market).
This explains why after I converted the 4TB to GPT (as a single partition), the system wouldn't recognize it.

Until I resolve the BIOS problem, I can try convert it to GPT (after splitting it in two), using the Win 10 in my laptop.

There goes my weekend :)

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@kanenas I have only found this to be the case with older mechanical hard drives of the external variety. Should you decide to remove it from the enclosure you might be able to remedy this problem somewhat. It could very likely be a bad bridge in the original enclosure as this is a common issue with many older external drives. Of course I have no clue what you are using for an external enclosure so I could be barking up the wrong tree. All I know is that this problem is NOT exclusive to MBR drives. Perhaps it only happens to old external hard drives that have been converted to GPT. Anyway, that has been my personal experience.

My advice is to attempt to make your repairs one drive at a time. Physically disconnect all drives that you are not currently working on before booting up your PC. Make sure you have your boot order established each time you add a new drive to work on. If you have two operating systems using the same license key you will definitely have a recipe for trouble on your hands. You do not need two versions of Windows 11 running on the same PC anyway, do you? If you plan on running dual boot on your PC please specify. Freebooter and others here are very capable with helping in this regard. BUT we need to address these issues one at a time.

Concerning the MBR->GPT conversion, something is missing somewhere...
I retried the process using Win 10 in the laptop (it runs in MBR mode) and got the same results.

For screen cap 1:
I connected the external 4TB USB disk (in its original enclosure) to the laptop (Win 10). It showed as MBR.
I converted it to GPT using Minitool. It converted fine.
I rebooted Win 10, checked the USB and it was still in GPT mode. Windows Explorer could see and access any the files in it.

For screen cap 2 and 3:
I connected the 4TB USB (in GPT now but still using its original enclosure) to Win 11 (that runs in GPT mode).
Error 1: it wanted to initialize the disk
Error 2: (properties): shows the same thing.

This is getting frustrating (but still interesting).

Why Win 10 has no problems reading a GPT disk even though that system is set up for MBR, whereas Win 11 looks and finds something missing?

I'll plug the disk again in the new USB 3 enclosure but I've tried it before and don't expect miracles.

Screen cap 1:



Screen cap 2:



Screen cap 3:

Thank you Scannerman. Sorry, I hadn't seen your last post earlier.

The disk is certainly old but in perfect shape. I add backup files to it for years and it never had any errors.
But its age or the way they used to utilize a single 4TB partition, might have thrown off the "modern" systems.

I'll try and get rid of some stuff that's in it to reduce its "used space" size. At its current load, I hate to think how long it will take to split its partition in two :)
I'll try it after I can get to the BIOS, correct the USB settings and see if anything changed.
I'll post any updates sometime next week.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

kanenas said:

Thank you Scannerman. Sorry, I hadn't seen your last post earlier.

The disk is certainly old but in perfect shape. I add backup files to it for years and it never had any errors.
But its age or the way they used to utilize a single 4TB partition, might have thrown off the "modern" systems.

I'll try and get rid of some stuff that's in it to reduce its "used space" size. At its current load, I hate to think how long it will take to split its partition in two :)
I'll try it after I can get to the BIOS, correct the USB settings and see if anything changed.
I'll post any updates sometime next week.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

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I've already been to the farm and back today. It's shaping up to be a good weekend. Yeah, I'm thinking the older firmware might be the cause. Hard to say. Still, it shouldn't take that long to partition the drive into two separate partitions. The thing that will take time is ripping the files off the drive first. MiniTool makes partitioning easy. Anyway, that's what I would do with it.

If disk 3 is the drive we are talking about (see: screen cap 3) then it can't be read because it isn't initialized. If you initialize it you will loose all the data. So if you have any data you need to recover on disk 3 the time to act is now, before you initialize and reformat. Either way, that drive won't be showing up as usable until it is initialized. Of course, if you already have a back up of disk 3 you can initialize this drive and reformat right away. But after that you'll be back to square one as you will still have yet to partition the drive.

I have a question. Is your UEFI/BIOS set to RAID?

There were some MBR drives that use a 4096-byte sectors instead of using a 512-byte sectors. They were called AF (Advanced format)
This AF enabled MBR drives bigger than the 2.2 T
They had a different electronic control (512-byte Emulation (512e) Disk) and could have a strange behavior if formatted or initialize as a regular drive.

Megahertz said:

There were some MBR drives that use a 4096-byte sectors instead of using a 512-byte sectors. They were called AF (Advanced format)
This AF enabled MBR drives bigger than the 2.2 T

Advanced Format - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

They had a different electronic control (512-byte Emulation (512e) Disk) and could have a strange behavior if formatted or initialize as a regular drive.

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Indubitably those would cost a fair dollar and would probably be used predominantly in the commercial/industrial field. My friend's Seagate was just your average external drive. I believe these sorts of drives come pre-configured so that the standard user could just start saving data to them directly without having to know much about the process of backing up data. The market for these things really exploded back in 2007, if I'm not mistaken, But they were notorious for developing bridge problems with the USB conversion. Often times there was really nothing wrong with the actual hard drive itself. People would crack open the cases, reformat the drive, and hook them up to SATA and they would work fine for years to come BUT anything over 3TB would present problems even if they were converted to GPT without being partitioned afterwards. I'm guessing the issue lies somewhere in the firmware. Perhaps some sort of shadow memory?

I don't suggest that all external hard drives are like this. The old Western Digital "My Books" were and my friend's old Seagate also had this problem. At first I thought it might be a thing that was exclusive to Western Digital SMR drives but that proved to be not the case. I'm having zero issues in this regard with my Seagate Backup Plus drives.

No RAID. I've used it ages ago at work on long-dead computers. The current desktop is to kill time pleasantly.

As for Advanced Format, I don't know. I was under the impression that its enclosure's chips pulled the trick.

Yes, we are talking about Disk 3.
When converted to GPT, Win 11 says it's uninitialized but why Win 10 has no problem with the same disk?
When set up as MBR (as it was initially), both used to recognize it just fine.

In the last iteration of this back-and-forth to MBR, Win 11 doesn't even see the disk when it's in MBR mode. Win 10 has no problems.

Which is why I blame myself for changing in the desktop BIOS the option on how to handle legacy USB. Either I set the wrong option or the BIOS programming didn't treat properly.
But that's an assumption... It could just be Win 11's handling of the oldie disks.

I'll know in a couple of days after I can get in and correct the BIOS setting.
As is, I can't even split the disk before Win 11 can see it. I have extra SSD storage to back up things in Win 11, but nothing in Win 10.

On the Advanced Format, something crossed my mind and I'll try it.
I'll put the disk in the new USB 3 enclosure I got for it and check if Win 10 still sees the full disk. Having only USB 2 on Win 10 shouldn't make a difference. I'll try it in its current GPT mode or convert it back to MBR if needed.
If the disk is working as 4TB, it can't be a trick of its enclosure.

Take care.

kanenas said:

No RAID. I've used it ages ago at work on long-dead computers. The current desktop is to kill time pleasantly.

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Just thought I'd check. Sometimes if this is changed it can throw older drives a real loop. It really shouldn't as we are talking about an external USB drive but stuff happens. Best to just leave as is then.

kanenas said:

As for Advanced Format, I don't know. I was under the impression that its enclosure's chips pulled the trick.

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The enclosure's chips pull the trick until they don't. I can almost guarantee you that you're struggling with a failing bridge in the enclosure and that there is nothing wrong with the drive itself. In fact, if you remove the drive from the enclosure and hook it up to SATA you'll likely have no issue with it after ward. Admittedly, I'm only speculating here but this is starting to look mighty familiar. Of course there is the off chance that the bridge in that enclosure just doesn't play well with Windows 11 but if you plan on using Win 11 the rule of thumb is that your drives should be in GPT. Yes, there are exceptions but the exceptions only prove the rule.

kanenas said:

Yes, we are talking about Disk 3.
When converted to GPT, Win 11 says it's uninitialized but why Win 10 has no problem with the same disk?
When set up as MBR (as it was initially), both used to recognize it just fine.

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You may be able to get your data back simply by switching the disk back to MBR in MiniTool. This of course assumes you haven't tried to do anything else with it since but it's worth a go. There could be a number of reasons why your Win 10 isn't encountering this issue. Firstly, it's running on SATA, I'm assuming. Secondly, it's an OS. Third, it's not 4TB.

kanenas said:

Which is why I blame myself for changing in the desktop BIOS the option on how to handle legacy USB. Either I set the wrong option or the BIOS programming didn't treat properly. But that's an assumption... It could just be Win 11's handling of the oldie disks.

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My personal experience is that Win 11 is not that forgiving of older drives. I'm not saying this is a bad thing as over time drives do need to be replaced. Your BIOS is not the problem. Nobody can tell you to keep your BIOS in CSM or Secure Boot but that's not the fault of the BIOS. Ideally, with Windows 11 you will want your settings to boot UEFI first. Legacy is for MBR, older operating systems, and other operating systems. If you're dual booting you still want UEFI because you're using Windows 10. (Windows 7 is another matter.) Select which drive you want to give boot priority to, save, and move on.

kanenas said:

'll know in a couple of days after I can get in and correct the BIOS setting.
As is, I can't even split the disk before Win 11 can see it. I have extra SSD storage to back up things in Win 11, but nothing in Win 10.

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You should be able to get into your UEFI/BIOS without issue if you have only the basic peripherals (keyboard and mouse) connected and all other drives disconnected. You need to tackle this one drive at a time. Just keep tapping the 'delete' key after you see the logo when you boot up. Myself, I disable "fast boot" when I'm in UEFI/BIOS because those couple of seconds are handy to have when you need them. From there you can go to your boot tab and set the boot priority. There shouldn't be much to choose from if all other drives are disconnected. The moment you introduce a new operating system to your PC it will default to that drive in boot priority so be ready to switch it if you want to keep the original boot priority. Again, I can't stress the importance of working on one drive at a time.

I hope this helps.

The original enclosure's chip is the only one working properly :). All the rest could drive me up a wall.

BIOS access is not a problem. Doing anything there, is. No mouse or keyboard is active while in the BIOS.

And some things of interest:

The original enclosure's chip is the one that did all the magic with the 4TB partition in MBR.

Using the original enclosure and as I mentioned earlier, the Disk 3 converted to GPT, works fine in Win 10, but shows as unallocated in Win 11.

Until I read a suggestion in a Minitool article for disks shown as unallocated:

I applied that in Win 11. My Win 10 was already set up properly)

Basically, go to Customize Power Plan -> Change Advanced Power Settings, then USB Settings -> USB selective suspend setting.
Make sure it's set to Disabled.
Save and reboot.

New Win 11 and I haven't fooled around with settings like that yet. So this setting might be the default.

I rebooted Win 11 and there's the full Drive 3 in GPT mode :)





I thought 'great!' but not quite there yet (:

I transferred the USB disk to a USB 3 enclosure and tried it again.

Without the funky original enclosure, the disk shows its true MBR face, so Win 11 (and Win 10), see only the first 2TB as a partition. Even that, shows a couple of folders for a total of 250GB.




It looks like I'll have to live with the original enclosure or buy another huge disk to backup Disk 3 before reformatting it.

Ah well, at least we learn something new every day...

It looks like we are making progress! As I suggested, the problem or 'trick' as you call it lies in the bridge of your enclosure. This is what I meant when I stated that it kept 'reverting' back in an earlier post. There is a chance that you will be able to use your mouse and keyboard in the UEFI/BIOS now that you disabled the 'selective USB settings'. I thought originally that you had four disks. Is there any chance that you have enough room on one of those to move enough of the files from the 4TB drive to make a permanent 2TB partition with your funky enclosure while you are in Windows 10? MiniTool will usually allow for this. You could strip the files while you're in Win 10. I'm assuming of course that the last screen shot at the bottom of the page was taken when you were in Windows 11. Just a thought.

Myself, I would strip off the data, pull the disk out of the enclosure, hook it up to SATA, completely format the drive in Disk Management, then look at it in MiniTool to ensure that I got everything and that it was in GPT, reformat it anyway and save that enclosure for use with an older PC. BUT that's me. Obviously Windows 11 insists that anything in that enclosure should be set to MBR. I suppose another work around would be to just use a newer drive in the enclosure that has been formatted in GPT and is less than 3TB — preferably 2TB to stay on the safe side. This would still provide ample space for backups.

Anyway, I'm sure you'll sort it out eventually. One more thing: Get rid of all that unallocated space. IMO you have too many recovery partitions and this could wreak havoc on your system. There are better ways of setting up multiple recovery options.

Truthfully, given that a decent USB enclosure can be had for $20-$30, I'd just pitch that ancient one and upgrade.

gunrunnerjohn said:

Truthfully, given that a decent USB enclosure can be had for $20-$30, I'd just pitch that ancient one and upgrade.

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Another option. Even so, if it works fine with older systems and older software it might still be worth keeping. I donated mine to my daughter and it works fine with her X58 platform because everything on that system uses MBR.

Unfortunately all the solutions in this case, would require a big backup external storage.
Transfer the old USB's data to it, initialize the old USB etc.
I'll check the prices on external SSD disks and maybe give it a try.
As it stands, I have 2 TB on the new M.2 disk but that's in Win 11 which can't see the USB properly, so no transfer of data between the two disks is possible.

Anyway, I'll take it to the store today and see what happens. They scared me off that a BIOS reset might affect some UEFI key and block Windows from booting. We'll see what they mean. At least they'll flip the two internal M.2 and get the newer one in higher priority in the PCI bus.

As for unallocated space, it's temporary.
I used it for a test with Samsung Magician's Over Provisioning but didn't measure any useful difference in speed and removed it. I'll assign the unallocated space to a neighbor partition later on.

Have a nice week all.

kanenas said:

Anyway, I'll take it to the store today and see what happens. They scared me off that a BIOS reset might affect some UEFI key and block Windows from booting. We'll see what they mean. At least they'll flip the two internal M.2 and get the newer one in higher priority in the PCI bus.

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Why not do it yourself? It isn't hard to install M.2 drives. Of course, if you have it under warranty and the service is included in the price of purchase I suppose that would be a wise choice. But. . I rather doubt that to be the case. I kept on stating in my response posts that you should disconnect all other drives and work on one drive at a time. I don't think you did this. What they're scaring you off with is the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) B.S. and it should not be an issue as you already have the security keys registered in your BIOS to both operating systems. It should be suffice. Sounds to me like the shop just wants to make a buck.

I agree with Scannerman, if you're remotely comfortable inside the box, swapping the internal M.2 drives shouldn't be a big deal. FWIW, I have done a couple of BIOS resets and changed the Windows physical boot drive since installing, and the system boots fine. I use Acronis TI to move things around, but there are tons of choices. If TPM was really that twitchy, you'd be hearing a lot more about issues with it.

Scannerman said:

Why not do it yourself? It isn't hard to install M.2 drives. Of course, if you have it under warranty and the service is included in the price of purchase I suppose that would be a wise choice. But. . I rather doubt that to be the case. I kept on stating in my response posts that you should disconnect all other drives and work on one drive at a time. I don't think you did this. What they're scaring you off with is the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) B.S. and it should not be an issue as you already have the security keys registered in your BIOS to both operating systems. It should be suffice. Sounds to me like the shop just wants to make a buck.

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Suspicious mind eh? :)
Rightly so but I'm careful with the shops I deal with.

Why not doing it myself:
The last ten days my lower back hurts badly if I sit down for a bit and then stand up. Pretty painful. When I stand up for a while, the pain goes away.
It's much easier for me to carefully pick up the computer and walk it to the car. The shop handled the carrying back and forth while I was there.
For the same reason, disconnecting all the other drives would be a killer so I never did it.

Back from the shop (the one that set up this computer for me a year ago):
They removed the battery for a bit, the options were auto-reset to defaults, and the mouse control while in BIOS is now back and working fine.
They also flipped the two M.2 drives. The new one boots first, with the second in priority being the older and smaller M.2.
Later on, I'll try some BIOS changes related to USB. I hope the BIOS doesn't become inaccessible again :)
The shop did it in 15-20 minutes and took it to the car. The cost was zero. I offered to pay of course but they stuck to their guns.
All in all, very nice service for the stuff they are familiar with.

Everything seems to work fine but the Windows peccadillos are still around.

1) The configuration after the shop. M.2 drives flipped.



2) The USB disk was taken off.
Its new box wouldn't handle the 4TB so I put it back in original box.
It worked after the power setting change I posted earlier but late at night it didn't so off it went to Win 10 that had no problems with it.
After I came back from the shop, I reconnected it to the desktop (Win 11) and it still had a problem. I ignored it for the time.

3) I checked the speed of the old M.2 as well as the new one after the flip to givet the new M.2 higher priority.
The new one got some improved results. The old one would have a problem competing anyway because it's almost full.

The new M.2



The old M.2



4) For no particular reason since it wasn't modified in any way, I checked the speed of the standard data ssd in the desktop. Another almost full 4TB disk.



5) Since this data disk is covered by Crucial's Storage Executive, I tried their Momentum Cache. Rebooted to activate it and tested the data disk again.



It gives a nice feeling for sure. It is only caching and not real disk magic and you should have a backup power supply to feel safe.
I came across it some time ago and got hooked by an article that claimed that Crucial applied this trick at all SSDs in the system no matter their brand.
Except Crucial decided to remove this capability for other brands. I can only find their latest version from their site (11.03.032025.00) so I can't verify that claim. It seems impossible to find an older version of this program...

6) One of those Windowss peccadillos.

Since step (3) and now, with a reboot in between for the Momentum Cache, I happened to look at the external USB disk.
It's alive! Again... For now...



Very hard to work eith Windows and keep your sanity :)

Regards to all. You've been great help. Nothing like back-and-forth ideas and arguments.

WOW, that first M.2 drive is a real slowpoke! Never saw one that slow!

gunrunnerjohn said:

WOW, that first M.2 drive is a real slowpoke! Never saw one that slow!

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They all get bad when they are getting full. It's just that their idea of 'full' doesn't match the user's.

kanenas said:

Since step (3) and now, with a reboot in between for the Momentum Cache, I happened to look at the external USB disk.
It's alive! Again... For now...

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It could just be that the old hard drive just won't work properly in an enclosure anymore. I'm glad you found some decent people who would do that work for you for free. Not many shops are into that level of customer service these days. That's mighty decent of them. Mighty decent. If it were me I'd get that extra 4TB drive with the money I saved taking it to the shop for free and do that data transfer. Then I'd completely reformat the old 4TB drive and run it in SATA. I could always put the new 4TB drive in the new enclosure. If the new enclosure can't handle a new 4TB hard drive there is likely something wrong with it and if that should be the case I'd be looking for a refund.

on the disk 1, in the black area, right click mount