I have 2.6, the latest available from Supermicro.
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Saw this setting in the BIOS which I thought might be helpful, but it wasnāt:
Regardless which option was chosen, the only available boot device is the EFI shell. If I put this SSD into a USB adapter, it boots from it without issue.
Right now, Iām using a Transcend 128GB SSD; I have a Patriot P310 on the way (Iād searched for P300 and hadnāt realized this was a different model), and will see how that does. I could always put in a SATA SSD, but it boggles my mind that this onboard slot doesnāt work for a boot device out of the box, even with a BIOS from last year.
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āPlease try to use a different or Supermicro certified M.2 drive. It should be recognized.ā 
Did you try installing CORE ? As @etorix suggests its not a drive issue ?
On the Transcend drive (the Patriot one hasnāt arrived yet), CORE 13.0 boots in UEFI mode, but not in Legacy mode. I havenāt tried messing with BIOS settings to see if Iām able to change that.
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Why would one want to boot in legacy mode in 2025? UEFI is the best since sliced bread. 
It was really a matter of trying both options and seeing which (if either) workedābut for a ten-year-old board, ālegacyā didnāt seem much of a stretch.
But I have to assume SCALE would boot in UEFI mode (I seem to recall some posts noting problems on the Microserver Gen8 because recent releases of SCALE didnāt offer Legacy mode), and yet SCALE (specifically, 25.10) doesnāt boot here. Now I wonder if there was an installer option I missed.
The Patriot SSD was just delivered; Iāll see if I can try that one tomorrow. Iāve also prepared a modified BIOS following the instructions at [HowTo] Get full NVMe Support for all Systems with an AMI UEFI BIOS - NVMe Support for old Systems - Win-Raid Forum, but have yet to flash it.
Iām starting to wonder if something went weird when I flashed the updated BIOS when I received the board. I did that through IPMI without any RAM installed on the board, and (other than the NVMe boot issue) Iām not noticing any abnormalities, but it doesnāt seem to behave as expected, soā¦
My provisional verdict on this board is ānice on paper, but quirky.ā
I have two of that exact family but not your exact model. Both behaving perfectly well.
Sorry I cannot be of any more help. For once I do not boot these systems from the onboard M.2.
EDIT: waitaminute - actually my TN CE system does. But I used a small SATA SSD in that M.2 slot and 2x Samsung NVMe in a AOC-SLG3-2M2 for the storage pool.
If you arenāt booting from the onboard m.2/NVMe, not a surprise. The two quirks Iāve encountered so far are:
- Absolutely does not support LRDIMMs (and sometimes eBay sellers arenāt clear that an RDIMM is actually an LRDIMM)
- Whatever weirdness is going on with NVMe booting
Obviously NVMe performance isnāt needed for the boot device, but itās handy to have a slot on the motherboard for it, without needing to plug into anything else. Itās the same reason Supermicro used their āSuperDOMā port (which they probably arenāt using any more).
Youād previously mentioned m.SATA, and thatās an option too (especially since the 3D-printed chassis Iām using only has 5 drive bays), but now Iām just wanting to sort out the NVMe boot thing. It still boggles my mind that Supermicro didnāt fully support this when the board was releasedāwhat else did they intend that slot for?
To not store/manage the EFI drive. If we speak about VMs in particular.
So you are running Proxmox 
Yes, but I was only considering physical servers atm.
Never was a secret. It seems like virtualbox and hyper-v use similar concepts. I assume that every hypervisor does. Because UEFI provides some kind of persistent storage that some OSās rely on.
So the key appears to be this question in the installer, which must be answered No:
If left to āyesā (the default), SCALE 25.10.0 fails to boot from either the Transcend 128 GB NVMe stick or the Patriot P310 240 GB oneāthe system sees no available boot devices and drops me into the UEFI shell. If set to āno,ā it boots successfully from both devices.
So this is looking like a pretty strange result: to boot SCALE from NVMe on one of these boards, you have to disable UEFI boot; to boot CORE, you have to enable it.
But then the boot option to boot SCALE appears as EFI OS. Weird.
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So the CORE installer does what it says regarding UEFI boot.
And the SCALE installer doesā¦ something, but lies about it anyway.
Maybe SCALE should use reptiles for nicknames rather than fishes?
āHā could be Hiss, from Sir Hiss in Disneyās Robin Hood.
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Iām more with Kaa.
Trust in meee. Just trust in meee.
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Hereās the partition table on the boot device when the SCALE 25.10 installer is told not to allow EFI boot:
GNU Parted 3.5
Using /dev/nvme0n1
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) p
Model: TS128GMTE110S (nvme)
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 128GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 2097kB 3146kB 1049kB bios_grub, legacy_boot
2 3146kB 540MB 537MB fat32 boot, esp
3 540MB 128GB 127GB zfs
Unless Iām mistaken, āespā would be an EFI System Partition?
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EFI System Partition - yes.
Possibly nuke that legacy boot one? Perhaps some boot stage gets confused by the presence of both?
When you install CORE with EFI, itās EFI only:
freenas# gpart show ada4
=> 40 62533216 ada4 GPT (30G)
40 532480 1 efi (260M)
532520 61997056 2 freebsd-zfs (30G)
62529576 3680 - free - (1.8M)
I mean, it boots with it this way, so I donāt know that I want to mess with it. But Iām wondering why it creates an EFI system partition when I tell it to not allow EFI boot. And itās populated, too:
root@nas2[/mnt]# mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt/efi
root@nas2[/mnt]# cd efi
root@nas2[/mnt/efi]# ls
EFI
root@nas2[/mnt/efi]# ls EFI
boot debian
root@nas2[/mnt/efi]# ls -lR
.:
total 1
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 512 Nov 7 06:25 EFI
./EFI:
total 1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 512 Nov 7 06:25 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 512 Nov 7 06:25 debian
./EFI/boot:
total 2626
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2688448 Nov 7 06:25 bootx64.efi
./EFI/debian:
total 4481
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 108 Nov 7 06:25 BOOTX64.CSV
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 87376 Nov 7 06:25 fbx64.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 93 Nov 7 06:25 grub.cfg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2688448 Nov 7 06:25 grubx64.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 850176 Nov 7 06:25 mmx64.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 960080 Nov 7 06:25 shimx64.efi
root@nas2[/mnt/efi]#
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I overlooked that ānotā - sorry
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