Hello all! About a week ago I asked around if anyone would be able to help me with my problem with inserting NVMe modules, particularly to insert them into my bios, but I was able to figure it out on my own. I will use this forum to explain the process I took step by step, and will attempt to give any assistance to anyone who needs it. However, as a disclaimer I nor anyone on this forum is responsible for any damage which may occur to your PC or other component while attempting to modify your bios, or computer. This includes, but is not limited to a bricked motherboard, hardware failure, or any other component failure directly due to the negligence of you the end-user. With that being said, this process is relatively straight forward if you follow the correct steps, the results are spectacular.
First I would like to list some pre-requisites:
-A HDD to Install Windows (only plan on installing have windows 7)
-GA-Z77X-UD5H motherboard (I used rev 1.0)
-The z77xud5h_mod9_nvme.f16 bios file (I only added NVMe support all credit goes to those at tweak town for the custom bios which has plenty of added features.)
-EaseUS Backup Todo (The free version works fine, and you only need this if you are going to install Windows 7 or 8 or if are migrating your data from Windows 8.1 or 10)
-An Intel 750 Series SSD (I used the 400GB Model, but the 1.2TB Model should work fine)
-Intel SSD Drivers (only for Windows 7)
-A usb flash drive 2-4GB tends to work best (It will be used to flash the motherboard bios)
-Another USB flash drive 8gb to use as a Windows 10 install medium (Only required for Windows 7 and 8 users, not 8.1 or 10)
-Windows Media Creation Tool
-Patience
Step One - Installing the Drive / Flashing the Bios / Windows 10 and 8.1 CLEAN Install
I personally inserted the SSD in the first, the closest to the CPU, PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, but this should work in any PCIe slot. Then plug your graphics card into your second PCIe slot. The GPU will run at x8 speeds, and the ssd will run at x4 speeds.
-Download the z77x-ud5h modded bios linked above and put that on the 2-4gb usb flash drive, plug it into the usb 2.0 slot directly into your motherboard. Clear your cmos, and all your bios settings, and then reboot.
-Now install the bios, using Q-Flash, and reboot.
-Load optimized defaults.
-Reboot, if you want to do a clean install of Windows 8.1 or 10 continue with this step if not move on to Step Two
-From here boot into your installation media through UEFI, by default all of the UEFI settings in the bios are turned on, and fast boot is turned off.
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU ACTIVATE FAST BOOT, IT WILL CORRUPT YOUR DATA
-Go to “Save, and Quit”, and choose the boot override UEFI - PMAP, not the Legacy PMAP
-From here install windows as you normally would
Step Two a - Setting up the Drive for Win7 and 8 users, and those who want to migrate their Data
If you are installing Windows 7 or 8 you must first install windows on your HDD, not the SSD. You must do this because, the Windows 7 and 8 install disks do not contain the necessary UEFI, drivers to install the OS directly to the SSD. You muse use supplementary drivers to install onto the drive, but then you must perform a clean install. The advantage to the method that I am describing is that you can easily migrate you data even if your HDD drive has a larger partition than the SSD. In my case, I migrated a 1TB drive with 200GB of data to my SSD with no problems!
Here is a list of what you have to do:
-Boot into your Windows OS
-You will notice that if you go into My Computer you WILL NOT see the SSD as an available storage drive, we are going to change that.
-First install the Intel NVMe SSD Drivers that I linked above
-Install them
-Once the drivers are installed, reboot, and then go to the start menu, and type in “Computer Manager”
-Open the program, and on the left panel, there will be a tab called Storage
-Click on Storage, and then go to Disk Management
-Now you should have a window that looks something like this:
-Right Click on the SSD Drive, initialize it, and the format it
-The only TWO things you need to make sure of when you format the drive are the following: the partition style is GPT, and format is NTFS
-If everything was done correctly you should be able to see the SSD in My Computer
-Now Install, and Open EaseUS Backup Todo
-Click on Clone, in the upper right hand corner
-Select your Windows drive as the Source drive
-Then choose your SSD as the Target Drive. Make sure at the bottom left hand corner you check off “optimize for ssd”
-Now the waiting process begins, do not shutdown your computer once the process finishes
Step Three - Creating a UEFI Boot partition / Windows 7 and 8 ONLY
As I mentioned before UEFI did not come bundled with the Windows so we must install it ourselves.
-You must now create a bootable usb with either Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 using the media creation manager
-After that reboot your PC, press F12, and choose UEFI - PMAP
-Press Shift+F10 to open up a console Window, now type everything except the italics
diskpart
list disk
sel disk X (Where X is your SSD)
list vol
list partition
-Then type:
sel partition X (Where X is your primary partition)
shrink desired = 200 minimum = 200
create partition efi
format fs = fat32
assign letter = b:
exit
mkdir b:\EFI
mkdir b:\EFI\Microsoft
cd /d b:\EFI\Microsoft
bootrec /fixboot
bcdboot C:\Windows /l en-us /s b: /f UEFI
Enjoy Your NVMe Boot Drive!
Finally, I would just like to list some credits to people, and guides that I followed to make this possible
1. Fernando, thanks to your extensive testing I was able to find plenty of resources to kick start this project
2. lordkag - Just because I saw your name all over the NVMe Forums assisting others!
3. And >here< is an end all site that has links to all the resources that I used!
4. If I missed anyone PLEASE PM me and I will gladly add you to this list.
P.S. - If there are any mistakes please PM and I will correct them, thanks!
P.P.S - If you enjoyed my guide, please leave some feedback I would really appreciate it!