C220 M5 NVME Not Booting

[ian31]

Been racking my brain and google-ing up a storm, looking through cisco posts and various sites to no avail.

I have a UCS-C220-M5, I picked up and installed the UCS-MSTOR-M2 (800-46240-01 B0+) but for whatever reason it shows up as SlotID: MSTOR-RAID in the BIOS and CIMC? I put a single 1tb Samsung 990 EvoPlus NVME on the adapter and plugged it into the motherboard. Also for some reason the drive appears as SlotID: MSTOR-RAID Unknown Vendor Mass Storage Controller

I booted from a Windows USB and was able to install Windows2022 to the NVME without issue. Upon restart, the drives nor UEFI BIOS boots to Windows, just get the EFI Shell screen.
I tried defining an advanced boot order with NVME, HDD (with MSTOR-RAID and MRAID) defined as a slot, this didnt make the system boot from the card. P-SATA and M.2 are defined to AHCI. Also tried switching them to LSI software RAID, also didnt help boot.

Running the latest firmware package, 4.3.2, UEFI mode. Also tried switching to legacy mode, didnt help.

Questions:
1. Should I not be able to boot Windows from the M2 adapter with a nvme plugged in?
2. I assume the "Unknown Vendor Mass Storage Controller" drive (ie samsung) is causing some issue, are 3rd party nvme's allowed and work, or only the cisco branded UCS-M2-240GB works?
3. What am I missing, has anyone else been able to get this working?

Cheers!

[Steven Tardy · Accepted solution]

UCS-MSTOR-M2 is a SATA controller according to the C220 M5 spec sheet page 51.

Product ID (PID)  PID Description
UCS-MSTOR-M2      Mini Storage Carrier for M.2 SATA (holds up to 2 M.2 SATA SSDs)

Try with a SATA M.2 drive instead of a NVMe M.2 drive.

[ian31]

The other confusing part to this is I can boot the Windows installer, Windows sees the nvme and installs Windows to it. Then on reboot it doesnt boot from the device and I end up at the EFI shell. From what I gather in UEFI mode, Windows writes the bootloader, so it should work?

[ian31]

Thanks for the tip! I started looking into this last night (well the 1 vs 2 notches on m.2 drives anyways as the Cisco 240gb have 2 notches). I'll pick up a m.2 sata and try it out.

Is there a nvme version of the UCS-MSTOR- module to utilize the newer nvme drives? 

[Elliot Dierksen]

I can't say for certain, but I recall that you can't boot from NVME drives in the main drives slots when they have all the proper cabling, etc. Honestly an NVME drive is serious overkill for a boot drive.

[ian31]

Thanks! This is on the m2 slots on the motherboard, figured they would support nvme.
Im awaiting some m.2 sata drives (not nvme) in the mail to see if those work. I could boot an nvme from a 3rd party m.2 - pcie adapter card, but the server saw the card as "unknown" and kept the fans on high. Seems to be a known "issue" as there is no way to lower the fan speed with an unknown card.
But yea, nvme may be overkill, but trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of this server as I can.