M.2 to Sata adapter for internal drive

I repair laptops for a local nonprofit. My budget is very low. I happen to have a lot of SATA m.2 drives. I also have a bunch of laptops that only support the 2.5 sata drive form factor. As I understand, those are both the same protocol with only different form factor. I used a USB to SATA adapter to confirm operation of my SATA to M.2 adapter(USB SATA adapter M.2 drive) all worked well as an external drive. Once I installed that into a laptop, the bios would not see it and I could not install windows11 Or ChromeOS.. Is there a way to get this to work?

Question by mr odus on Super User, licensed CC BY-SA. We show a short excerpt and link to the original thread as credit.