When I got my device, I reinstalled Windows 11 Home 24H2 on the eMMC, restored all the missing drivers, updated the BIOS to M1V307, disabled CSM, enabled Secure Boot and everything was working fine. After about a week I bought a Kingston NV3 4TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD and I inserted it into slot No.1. When I started the device again, Windows locked up on the lock screen and I had to do a hard shutdown (holding the power button) on order to try again. After a few freezes all roughly at the same point I decided to try to reinstall Windows.
Reinstalling Windows caused the installation to freeze on the “add your Microsoft account” screen and again I had to do a hard shutdown in order to try again. After this, I opened BIOS and after I restored the defaults I tried again. This probably reverted CSM to enabled and Secure Boot to disabled. This time the installation finished and Windows booted up on the ME mini. I changed the BIOS settings again to disable CSM and enable Secure Boot and the freezing returned.
After this one time I never got Windows 11 to boot again or install again (I tried with 24H2 and 25H2). I tried countless times with all the possible combinations of CSM and Secure Boot. It always locked up on the “add your Microsoft account” screen during installation and if I installed it with the SSD removed then it would freeze on the lock screen when I reinserted the SSD back to slot No.1.
Note: I never tried to install Windows 11 on the SSD itself, it was always on the eMMC.
After many failed attempts I tried to move the SSD to slot No.4 and this seems to solve all the issues. With it in slot No.4 everything seems to be working just fine. I can install Windows normally and log in without problems.
So, is this a problem with Windows, the ME mini or the SSD? I need to know if I should avoid this SSD in the future if there are any known compatibility issues with the ME mini.
One more thing to note. Out of curiosity I tried installing Ubuntu 25.04 on the eMMC and returned the SSD to slot No.1. I haven’t done much testing with this but with Ubuntu everything seems to be working fine. With the SSD is slot No.1 I haven’t experienced any lockups or freezes in Ubuntu. It seems to just work.
