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Install and boot from an NVMe SSD on a Dell OptiPlex 790 or 990

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In this post I will show you how you can modify the BIOS of a Dell OptiPlex 790 or 990 so that it can support an NVMe SSD drive as a boot device.

Although these machines have a UEFI BIOS, they do not contain an NVMe driver. By adding the driver into the BIOS you can boot from a PCIe NVMe SSD. I managed to achieve these speeds with a 256 Gb Western Digital Blue from Amazon.

Image showing performance of a NVMe drive installed into a Dell OptiPlex 790

As the machine only has PCIe 2.0 it is not able to reach the full speed of the NVMe drive, but it still represents a significant boost in speed over a SATA SSD.

Here is the PCI adapter and the Western Digital SSD installed in an OptiPlex 790 Small Form Factor:

Western Digital Blue NVMe SSD Installed onto a PCI Adapter inside a Dell OptiPlex 790 Small Form Factor.

Warning

This blog post contains instructions on how to modify your BIOS.

You could easily break your machine. Proceed at your own risk!

Table of contents

Required Hardware

In order to carry out this upgrade, you will need a few things:

The procedure is slightly different depending on the model and form factor, but mostly the same. I have not tried this on an OptiPlex 390, so I have no idea if it will work.

Procedure Overview

This process involves the following steps:

  • Upgrade to the most recent BIOS from Dell:
  • Installing Required Software and drivers.
  • Backing up your current BIOS.
  • Adding NVMe driver support into the BIOS backup.
  • Writing the modified BIOS back to the system.
  • Optimising BIOS settings.

Install the Required Drivers and Software

Before being able to read from or write to the BIOS, you need to install Intel Management Engine drivers. But instead of installing them from Dell, get these more up to date drivers from Lenovo.

Next, download the Intel Management Engine System Tools v7 r2, which contains the tools required to flash the new bios.

Also download the NVME Driver which will be injected into the BIOS Image.

Finally you will need UEFI Tool 0.28 to make the actual BIOS modification. Here is a direct link to that version.

Put the machine into Service Mode

Now that you have the machine prepared, you need to put the machine into service mode before you can proceed:

  • Shut the machine down.
  • Remove the mains power supply.
  • Locate the two pin service connector and put a jumper on it.

If you are upgrading a Small Form Factor machine, the service jumper is in an awkward position which will require you to remove the Optical Drive and Hard Drive cage to access it. Once those are out of the way, you can find near the RAM slots. Here is an image of the motherboard from a 790 SFF:

Image of Dell OptiPlex 790 Motherboard.

If you do not have a spare jumper, you can borrow the one from the Password reset jumper. Simply shift the jumper from the password pins to the service mode pins as shown below:

Image showing Service Mode Pin on Dell OptiPlex 790

You can now boot the machine again in service mode, but you will receive a couple of warning messages:

Warning from Dell OptiPlex 790 when the Password Reset Jumper has been set.
This warning passes after a few seconds and will be gone when the jumper is put back into the correct position.

You will then receive a message informing you that the machine is in Service Mode:

Warning from Dell OptiPlex 790 when the Service Jumper is active.
Press F1 to continue or Press F2 to access the BIOS settings.

If you do not put the machine into service mode you will not be able to backup or update the BIOS properly.

Modify and Upgrade the BIOS

Now that you are in service mode, you can continue with the backup and modification.

Backup the existing BIOS

Open a command prompt as an administrator and change to the directory where you extracted the Intel ME System Tools. Then navigate to the subdirectory \Flash Programming Tool\WIN64 (or WIN32 if you are on 32-Bit installation).

Within that directly use the command:

fptw64.exe -d backup.bin

Image of Intel Flash Programming Tools taking a backup of a Dell OptiPlex BIOS.

Modify the BIOS and Inject the NVMe Driver

Next, open UEFI Tool and open the backup.bin file. Expand the sections as per the following screenshot:

UEFI Tool with Dell OptiPlex 790 BIOS Loaded

Scroll to the bottom of this section and you should see an area that looks like this:

Image of UEFI Tool at the correct position to insert an NVME Driver.

Next, right click on item with the name E0364FEE-1440-4A41-AD3E-50E0B106A83D and choose Insert After.

Choose the file NvmExpressDxe_Small.ffs that you just downloaded earlier and you will see it appear right after the DellDaBfa section:

Now go to File -> Save Image File and save the file as nvme.bin and put it in the same location as the flash tool. Go back to your command prompt and run the command:

fptw64.exe -bios -f nvme.bin

Image of Intel Flash Programming Tool writing an NVMe enabled BIOS to an OptiPlex 790.

Shut down the machine and remove the jumper from the service pins and move it back to the password reset pins if you took it from there.

The BIOS modification is complete!

Install the PCI NVMe SSD

If you have not yet installed your SSD into the machine, you can do it now.

Optimise BIOS Settings

Now that you have written the new BIOS, restart the machine. If you do not have any SATA drives connected you will receive a warning on start-up that says:

Alert! Hard Drive not found

You can fix this by going into the BIOS Setup and then System Configuration -> Drives. Untick all the SATA ports which do not have drives connected:

Finally, if you want the maximum possible speed from your new drive, consider disabling C-States in the BIOS. This makes it marginally faster, but I doubt you would notice much difference:

Enjoy your NVMe Enabled OptiPlex 790 / 990

Now you can install an operating system of your choice or clone one of your existing drives to your new NVMe drive and enjoy a decent performance increase.

In my opinion, upgrading the Dell OptiPlex 790 or 990 with PCI NVMe Solid State drive is a brilliant value upgrade. If an old machine can be given a new lease of life, then that is a great win. The performance boost if you are upgrading from a mechanical hard drive will be huge.

On my machine I can boot to the Windows 10 Desktop in 11 seconds. The configuration of my machine is:

  • Intel Core i5-2400
  • 16Gb Ram (4 x 4Gb)

Again, here is the PCI adapter that I used:

If you upgrade your OptiPlex 790 or 990, please let me know your results in the comments.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ganesh says

    Hi Paul,
    Is it possible to do the Optiplex 3040 Micro, yes I knew that, there is no PCIe but there is M.2 SSD Slot Mini available (For Wifi & BT ) maybe this question silly one but curiosity, thanks in advance.

  2. sam ito says

    So graet!
    Please tell me about optiplex 980 bios modification.
    and when I try to optiplex 780 with same procdure, but I didnot read orig. BIOS.

    ??

  5. John K Peterson says

    Hey Paul. Thank you so much for posting. I bought a 990 with no HD or os. I assume this method won’t work

  7. Steve.P says

    It worked for me on Dell OptiPlex 990 but can you explain how you can boot straight from an NVME as it is not seen at bootup and In the bios I use opencore and the NVME.efi driver before!!

  8. Paulie says

    The whole post is about how to do this. Which part is unclear? You can boot directly from NVMe if you have made the modification described in the blog post and have your BIOS set to UEFI mode.

  9. Steve.P says

    Hello Paul,

    Please let me thank you for your efforts on enabling NVME booting straight from bios, once I enabled UEFI booting from the OptiPlex 990 bios Iwas able to add an entry from Windows Boot Manager and was able to boot the NVME from start without an sata or usb stick into windows, great job and thanks again.

  11. Bob says

    Thanks for your guide. but… no joy. Windows 10 recognizes the PCIe SSD once the OS is booted from a SATA drive, but evidently the bios on my machine does not.
    Optiplex 790 Desktop (DT)
    I7 processor
    A22 bios
    The bios install and flash works as per your guide, but even a windows install usb can’t recognize the PCIe. I’ve tried the SSD in both the PCIe16 & the PCIe4 slots.

  13. Bob says

    Yes, Steve. And I cloned the SATA OS to the PCIe once with it formatted MBR and once as GPT (like the SATA).
    After surrendering I added a boot option with bcdedit for the PCIe and a timeout of 0. I imagine the system starts from the SATA then jumps to the PCIe at some point, There’s only a savings of 3 seconds (boot in 32.02) but other monsters like Photoshop & Visual Studio load dramatically faster

  14. Steve.P says

    Hi Bob, Once I used used this guide I noticed that the PCIe drive light would flash to indicate that the drive was recognised. As for your boot options I would try booting with only the PCIe drive and as long as your windows installed PCIe is formated to GPT and you have changed the bios to boot from UEFI after a reboot an entry appeared for Windows Boot Manager, But you can also go into the Bios and add an entry for it as seen in this link. The path should be \EFI\BOOT|BOOTX64.EFI

    https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/u/usagi_2017/20181106/20181106235931.png

    Hope this helps

  15. Bob says

    Thanx again, Steve. Added a boot entry, but suspect it’s the same as the SATA (not the Windows Boot Manager) I tried disabling all the SATA drives (unchecking in bios) but the bios then reports no bootable device found. I don’t want to try deleting the other boot options because the only way to get them back is to return to Service Mode & reflashing the bios.
    My SSD doesn’t have an onboard access led

  17. Bob says

    Success. The problem lay in wanting to keep my current Windows 10 setup.
    Solution: unplugged all SATA’s & performed USB Windows install on top of the already cloned OS on PCIe, plugged all back in, rebooted but had to go back to bios to uncheck the SATA’s & boot again. After that, re-checked the SATA’s in bios and the machine will now allow setting priority to either OS without the dreaded “No Hard Disk Found” mesasge (I got that several times while the USB was re-installing but advanced via the F1 key.)
    Evidently the install USB wriote something to UEFI that no amount of my tinkering did.

  19. Richard Sittig says

    Paul, You took the risk and created a success! I praise you for that.
    I have Optiplex 790 and 990, running well on SATAs with MBR. I tried a MBR to GPT, but it failed and messed up both drives. Have since reinstalled Win10 MBR on them.
    Do you have a favorite way to do a Windows 10 MBR to GPT conversion? I had used command line MBR-GPT command. I have a blank Samsung NVMe in a Sabrent 4 lane PCIe adapter. It reads at 1660MB/s. Would like to make that my UEFI boot drive.
    Is it too roundabout to convert one Win10 MBR disk to GPT. then clone it to the Samsung NVMe in order to be ready with 2 possible UEFi Boot drives, when the BIOS entry is done
    Richard

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