Hello,
I am trying to instal on my rig an SM961, nevertheless I do not seem capable to provide a proper driver for a clean w7 pro 64bits instal. (rig = mobo : z170xpsli gigabyte, cpu: i76700k, ssd : nvme m2 sm961 512gb).
The motherboard is detecting the sm961 in the boot options, but when I try to instal w7 on the sm961 I do not see detect during the setup no matter which driver I use.
I tried this drivers :
- 64bit Intel NVMe Windows Driver v1.7.0.1002 WHQL
- 64bit Intel RSTe AHCI & RAID drivers v15.0.1.1040 WHQL
- 64bit Intel RSTe NVMe drivers v4.5.0.2122 WHQL for Win7 x64
- Samsung NVMe drivers v1.4.7.17 WHQL for Win7
integrated with nlite or forced manually (individually and in bulk) during w7 setup but they do not seem to help, w7 instal still do not show the sm961 in the w7 setup drive selection list.
Any idea where is my mistake ?
Thank you in advance for your time 
@darkpf :
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!
The only driver, which should work, is the last one you tried. I don’t know any other Samsung NVMe driver, which would work better for the Samsung SM961.
Why did you try Intel drivers for a Samsung NVMe Controller?
Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Hello Dieter,
Thank you very much for your prompt feedback 
I was kind of desperate, I tried other stuff in case of dependencies I would not be aware of (without success obviously ;)).
Do you, by any chance, know where I could get the vanilla nvme driver from w8/10 (to try instead of the samsung one) ?
You will not be able to use the Win8/10 in-box NVMe driver named stornvme.sys with Win7, because in-box drivers generally don’t have have any associated *.cat file, which means, that this driver is not digitally signed at all.
ok, so no solution on this side 
I didn’t think to mention (it’s now editted in the topic title), it’s an m.2 drive.
I found a solution by mistake via this link on gigabyte website :
http://gigabytedaily.blogspot.ch/2015/09…ndows-7-by.html
This tool is helping to add usb3 driver to a w7 instal, but it also embed some nvme drivers.
I tried it, it worked fine ! (I finally see the drive during the w7 instal)
I hope it will help other people 
Hi,
in 2019, it helps me a lot !
I have installed the driver from this directory from the archive :
WindowsImageTool\StorageControllers\Samsung_NVMe_v1_4_7_17\64bit
it works fine on windows7
at the first disk manager launch, i have to kill it, but on the second launch, i’ve got a popup that asks me to format the M2 SSD disk
once again thanks you !