Win 7 installation on SSD through non-bootable PCIe card?

[johanblondelle]

Hi,
I have an old PC that I use as a general workhorse/server (Acer, E2160 processor, 3 GB RAM - I know, OLD ). I installed a Samsung EVO850 SSD but strangely this is not operating at its full speed: it runs only at SATA I whereas the old HDD next to it uses SATA II. I've tested with other SSD's, and none run beyond SATA I - so be it.

Now, I have a SATA 3.0 to PCIe controller card which would allow me to run the SSD at full speed and finally see some performance impact. However, any drive plugged into this card is not selectable as boot device in the BIOS.

My question is the following:
Is it somehow possible to put just the necessary boot files on my HDD (plugged directly into the motherboard) but then to run Windows and all applications from my fast SSD plugged into the PCIe SATA card?

Thanks in advance for any insights or ideas!
Johan

 

[SIW2]

You can try clover.

Clover on a usb stick ( e.g. plugged into the rear of your machine). Set that usb as first boot device in bios. then you have clover popup and give you a boot menu selection from which you can select your pcie connected disk. Normally it is used for booting nvme disk via pcie on machines that don't otherwise support it. I am not sure how it would work for bios ( not efi ) as I haven't tried it.

I dont know if your add in pcie card would have any effect on that.

The way to find out is to try.

[Guide] NVMe-boot without modding your UEFI/BIOS (Clover-EFI bootloader method)