ASROCK 450M Steel Legend Micro-ATX NVME Issue

Solution for NVME SSD not showing up on steel legend motherboards:

Hey everyone. I found the solution. I have been working through this exact issue in the Asrock B450 Steel Legend ATX motherboard. I have a Adata XPG SX6000 Lite NvME drive installed in the top m.2 slot, and a second HDD installed in the Sata3_1 port. I initially installed windows on the m.2 ssd with no issues and got everything configured. I then initialized the HDD in disk manager and off to the races. Upon restarting the PC, it failed to boot and the m.2 ssd would not show up. After much frustration and troubleshooting, I reinstalled windows onto the HDD and concluded that the SSD must be faulty after much hardware troubleshooting.

I RMA the ssd and after 1 month the new one arrived. I installed it in the computer along with the windows usb stick. I loaded the bios and boot override to the usb stick. In the windows disk utility I formatted the HDD to unallocated space and did a fresh install of windows on the SSD. Everything was going great. Got into windows, installed updates and drivers with many successful restarts.... final step, initialize HDD in disk utility then restart for good measure. BOOM. Failed to boot, ssd doesn't show up in the bios....

Okay so I RMA the ssd for nothing and they actually issued a replacement... In an act of pure desperation, I shut down the computer and unplugged the HDD from Sata3_1 then restart. SUCCESS! The ssd shows up again! Boot into windows, everything is great. I shut down and plugged the HDD into Sata3_2 then boot. Both drives show up in bios, restart and everything goes smooth. Problem solved!

For good measure I shut down the PC and plugged the HDD back into sata3_1. Startup, no ssd. Okay so clearly there is some kind of conflict between m.2_1 and sata3_1. Remove your second drive from sata3_1 and you are off to the races!!!





Extra tips:

- Top port is for nvme ssd only, you must use top port for nvme ssd and bottom port for SATA ssd.

- DISABLING CSM COMPATIBILITY WILL MAKE M.2_1 SSD NOT TO APPEAR

- SET BOOT PRIORITY #1 TO WINDOWS BOOT MANAGER (SSD NAME), Do not select "NVME:(SSD Name)" or it will fail to boot.

- Enter Hard Drive BBS properties and make option #1 NVME:(ssd name), disable other options (This will cause the PC to enter bios if there is a failure rather than showing other screens.)

I installed a PATRIOT 512GB PCIe3 x4 2280 VPN100-512GM28H and it is working perfect with bios version 2.5

Other installed working hardware:
Ryzen 7 3700X 3,6 GHz 8 core processor (Zen 2 Matisse) at 3600MHz
Corsair CMK16GX4M2B3200C16 kit 2 x 8 GB DDR4 in slots A2 and B2 at 3200 MHz
graphics: Gigabyte RTX 2060 mini ITX OC 6GB

The only problem I met was with bios 2.1: I had to remove the second 8GB DDR4 memory module from slot B2 temporarely to be able to upgrade to bios v2.5
From there everything worked fine.

Upgraded to 2.6... just sent the drive back for the same one.. maybe it's the drive..

DylPikl wrote: I'm using this board (bios 2.60) with a 970 Evo Plus as boot disk, works like a charm.

What's the secret?

I'm using this board (bios 2.60) with a 970 Evo Plus as boot disk, works like a charm.