If you used the Microsoft Windows Media Creation Tool to create your Windows 10 installation USB flash drive, then this could be a problem, as Fernando’s guide is very clear about using Rufus to create the Windows 10 installation USB flash drive.
If you flash the modded BIOS correctly you will see something like “PATA” or “PATA-SS” in the boot section of the BIOS. This “PATA” or “PATA-SS” is not bootable; it’s only evidence that your BIOS now recognizes the NVMe SSD. After correctly installing Windows 10 using the Rufus created USB flash drive in UEFI mode (with all recommended settings in the BIOS, and no other drives connected), “Windows Boot Manager” (or sometimes even “Microsoft Windows”) will be an option in the boot section of the BIOS. These “Windows” entries in the boot section of the BIOS are bootable, and only in UEFI mode.
Hi Fernando. Please do not pay attention to my english, I am from Russia and use Google translator. My question to you is this: will I work with NVMe on my motherboard "MSI Z97-G43" I want to buy the adapter "JEYI CoolSwift PCIE3.0 NVME adapter x16 PCI-E" and insert it into the slot for the video card pci-e 3.0 x16 SSD "Samsung 970 EVO "Can I make it bootable for installing windows?
@FighterForLove :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
I am pretty sure, that the procedure of the start post will work for you, if the original BIOS of your Intel 9-Series chipset mainboard shouldn’t natively support NVMe.
If you want to install Windows 7 onto your NVMe SSD, don’t forget to integrate the related MS NVMe Hotfix into the Win7 image.
Good luck!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Hi Fernando & everyone else 
I was told at a store today that I should buy a Samsung 970 EVO,
put it on a Startech x4 PCI Express to M.2 PCIe SSD Adapter Card
in the PCIe(8) lane on my ASUS P9X79 Motherboard with a 3960X
CPU and I could then use it as boot/OS-disk for Windows 7-10 …
But I suspect that some extra steps has to be taken; right ? Help !
NB :
3960X is only a PCIe 2.0 CPU so will that “slow trait” influence on
the performance of the M.2 card or cripple an 980Ti/1080Ti GPU .
And what speeds on disk will I see with this “hardware-mixture” ?
PS : I dont use (or plan to use) any RAID-configurations …
@TVD :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
No, you can just follow the guide (= start post of this thread).
You may not get the maximum, but anyway an outstanding good performance.
Good luck!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Dear Fernando, Thank you very much for the guide! I have changed the BIOS and it shows PATA SS in the BIOS boot options successfully!
Here is my system:
MB: ASUS P8H67-M PRO
OS: Win7 X64 Ultimate
BIOS: AHCI enabled
1st Boot drive: SATA SSD, MBR mode
2nd drive: PCIe NVMe drive
Here is my question:
My win7 didn’t recognize my PCIe NVMe drive until I found the hotfix from Microsoft and installed it. After that, I can see my NVMe drive in windows.
However, I want to make it the boot drive, so I download AOMEI Backupper and cloned from SATA to NVMe drive.
I unplugged SATA and chose PATA SS to boot, still got no boot device error.
Can you please shed some light here? I really don’t want to reinstall Windows and all my programs!
@shawn :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
You will never be able to boot off the Boot Manager entry “PATA SS”, because this means booting in Legacy mode. You can only boot into your NVMe SSD in UEFI mode.
How often do you change the system drive? This event is a very good opportunity to get rid of all the garbage from the past years.
In any case you have to start the Win7 installation in UEFI from scratch by using an OS image with integrated MS NVMe Hotfix.
Once the OS installation onto the NVMe SSD has been completed, you can recover your drive C by replacing the just installed OS partition by the backuped one, but this is not the procedure I recommend to choose.
Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Thank you for the reply!
My OS hasn’t been changed for over 5 years and I know there are a lot of garbage, but it still works. Reinstall the OS is not a problem, but reinstalling all my programs will take a long time. I actually replaced at least 2 SSDs for the boot driver in the past by cloning, with minimum issues.
I am interested in the idea of "replacing the just installed OS partition by the backuped one". Is there a guide for that?
Thanks a lot!
I don’t have written such guide, because I neither tried nor recommend such procedure.
The problem is, that your currently used boot sector is a LEGACY one (with a Master Boot Record) and boots in LEGACY mode off a SATA connected SSD by using an MS or Intel AHCI driver, whereas the new boot sector has to be an EFI one (with a GUIMode Partition Table) and has to boot in UEFI mode off a PCIe connected NVMe SSD using the generic MS NVMe driver.
So you have
a) to convert the partition scheme of your currently used system drive to GPT and
b) to replace the currently used system drive storage driver from AHCI to NVMe (requires changes within the registry),
before you can clone your currently used drive C.
Wow! It sounds VERY complicated! It might be possible for Windows 10, but the one I am using is Win 7…
I think I am giving up at the moment. Maybe eventually I will start from scratch in the future!
Thanks again for your help!
Confirmed to work on MSI 970 Gaming motherboard with AMD FX-8350 CPU and Samsung 970 Evo 500G .
I followed your guide on Linux and got >UEFITool< from the official GitHub repo.
Since the M-Flash tool inside the Bios just freezes when trying to Flash the custom Bios file (also happens with unmodified Bios and different usb flash drives) I opted for >Flashrom< (some good >documentation<) to flash directly from the OS.
My PC boots now in like 3 seconds and big applications like Libreoffice start super fast. Now is my CPU the biggest bottleneck in my system
between the SSD and the GTX 970 but I’ll wait for 7nm CPUs.
Thanks for the guide!
@LegoVogeL :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum and thanks for your feedback!
It is fine, that you succeeded.
Enjoy the performance of your new NVMe SSD as system drive!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
More success on an Asus P8B WS motherboard adding the "NvmExpressDxe_4" driver to the latest available BIOS from ASUS. I am using a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD with Asus Hyper PCIe adapter.
As a note: At first attempt my BIOS got corrupted and the system did not boot at all (off course…). So the “Flashrom” utility installed on my Raspberry Pi saved the day.
Happy modding and thanks for the Tutorial!
@Asterix :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum and thanks for your feedback!
It is fine, that you succeeded.
Enjoy it!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Guys, I got a bit of a strange situation with Samsung 970 EVO on a Asus Maximus VIII Impact Z170 board.
The board supports NVMe out of the box, however via a u.2 connector. So far I have been using a Samsung 950 Pro via an m.2 to u.2 adapter without any problems.
However with the 970 EVO connected, more often than not it will not boot displaying POST code E5 (‘Reserved for future AMI progress codes’) - not really helpful.
It did manage to boot a few times - like 1 in 20 times and works well until the next reboot.
One thing that I want to try is to replace the NVMe bios module with the newest ‘NvmExpressDxe_4’ module.
If you have any other ideas please let me know.
@mtothaj :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
Your request has nothing to do with the topic of this thread, because your Z170 chipset mainboard natively supports NVMe.
I do not recommend to do that, because the GUID of the NVMe module doesn’t match the other ones.
Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Nevertheless the native support does not seem to be working in this case. 970 EVO worked fine with P9X79 PRO with ‘NvmExpressDxe_4’
In case of M8I the bios has been modded for Coffeelake support, however cannot seem to see why that would be a problem.
950 Pro works fine in pure UEFI / CSM off mode so not sure why 970 Evo is not working.
The fact is that when connected to and from the hard drive it is not visible even in faults 10, when trying to install the nvme the driver writes "device is not connected". ssd samsung 970
Hello gents. Perfect work, thanks for hint.
I would like to ask you for kind help regards to gigabyte BIOS setting.
I followed instruction to adapt GA-H77M-D3H bios (F14) by protocols NVMe/NvmeSmm/NVMEINT13 extracted from GA-H97M-D3H using MMTool. Bios prepared and flashed successfully, but Im surprised there is not any NVMe mode in SATA MODE roll menu (only AHCI/IDE/RAID). have installed EVO850 SSD today, but Im thinking to buy NVMe (kingston KingSpec M.2 SSD) + PCIe reduction.
Can somebody using Gigabyte MB let me know, if the drive is shown only in case is connected and detected in BOOT ORDER selection or its displayed in SATA MODE as well?
Thanks!
Hi everyone, first post but what an excellent thread which has helped me in the past.
A query, I have an GA-Z97X-UD5H-BK motherboard (an excellent board prob the best I’ve ever bought) running W10 currently on an Samsung EVO 840.
As it’s my main work machine I was wanting to know the easiest method to clone the W10 operating system onto a recently purchased Samsung EVO 970.
My 1st attempt has obviously not gone to plan as the read / write speeds are no where close to the potential 2500s. I cloned the drive from the 840 to the 970. Reading through the thread it’s become obvious is that it’s operating a a MBR via a AHCI driver rather than an UEFI GPT drive and a NVME driver.
If anyone could give me the quickest method to set up the 970 appropriately so that I can clone the 840 across it would be appreciated. I’d prefer not to have to re install and re set up the W10 operating system.
Kind regards,