Hi,
I have a workstation Fujitsu Celsius W520 with Win 7 x64 (MB D3167-A11) and recently bought a Samsung 990 Evo Plus SSD 4TB and a Ugreen PCIe to M.2 Expansion Card and after placing it in the PCIe slot, the card is detected while the SSD disk is shown as “PCI Device” and the system try to install the drivers automatically but can’t find them while searching on “WIndows Update”.
I’ve tried the “Samsung_NVM_Express_Driver_3.3.exe” from Samsung website but it says that no driver is detected.
Can’t get rid of that yellow mark! and it seems that many ppl have this problem and it stays unsolved everywhere.
I know all the things about booting problems from PCIe SSD but “Clover” seems to solve it but only once I’ll manage to make the drive detected and available.
I’ve tried changing PCIe port, uninstall it, “scan for hardware change” and the result is always the same, no way to get it recognized.
I saw this post about a similar subject but not sure it will be OK also for my case!
Any suggestion on how to proceed to solve the problem?
Thank you so much!!!
Edit by Fernando: Thread title specified and shortened
@EMC
Welcome to the Win-Raid Forum!
There are at least 2 problems with your system:
- Your in-use Operating System Win7 doesn’t have any NVMe driver in the box.
- The mainboard BIOS of your Workstation doesn’t support booting off an NVMe SSD.
The first problem can be solved by the installation of a Win7 compatible NVMe driver. According to my own experience it is not even necessarary to use a modded driver, where the missing HardwareIDs of the NVMe Controller has been added to the related *.INF file.
So I recommend to do the following:
- Download and unzip the original 64bit Samsung NVMe driver v3.3.0.2003 WHQL for Win7 x64. You will find the download link within the first post of >this< thread.
- Enter the Device Manager and search for the device whose driver is missing (should be listed within the section “Storage Controllers”).
- Force the manual installation of the desired Samsung NVMe driver by using the “Let me pick…” option, pressing the “Have Disk” button, navigate to the *.INF file of the unzipped Samsung NVMe driver and disregard the warning you will get.
After the reboot your NVMe SSD and its NVMe Controller will be detected by the OS and the related NVMe driver will be shown by the Device Manager as being WHQL certified and 100% compatible. From now on you can use the NVMe SSD for storage purposes without any restrictions.
The usage of your NVMe SSD as bootable system drive is not absolutely impossible, but rather difficult and risky. You will have to modify the non-UEFI BIOS of your workstation’s mainboard and to get it properly flashed, but this is not the topic of this thread.
Good luck!
Hi Fernando,
thanks a lot for quick and detailed answer!
The title you’ve modified was carefully chosen using all the keywords I did use to search a solution for the problem… but OK anyway!
Already being able to use it as “storage” can be good for the moment…
The situation however is the in Device Manager it is not shown in “Storage Controllers” but in “Other Devices” => PCI DEVICE and under PCIe Root Port when shown by connection.
Will it be OK anyway to install the “secnvme.inf” in this case?
I earlier tried to install an “nvme.inf” without certificate and had to restore the system…
Let me know what you think about it! I can try the installation…
Thank you!!!
@EMC
Yes, you can try the driver installation by doing a right-click onto the listed yellow flagged device named “PCI Device” and choosing the “update driver” option. The shown HardwareIDs of the “PCI Device” are the ones of the Samsung SSD’s NVMe Controller!
So… making the “update driver” and choosing the folder with your “64bit Samsung NVMe driver v3.3.0.2003 WHQL for Win7 x64” gave no results, nothing installed!
but !!! :)))
after selecting the other option “Let me pick…” and then selecting “Storage Controllers” and “Have disk” and going to pick your “inf” WOW yes! now it is shown correctly in the device manager but still can’t see it nowhere/browse but I suspect it’s just because needs to be formatted first, right???
EDIT
Made initialization GPT because the disk is 4tb and will be booted from USB + volume formatting and now I see it!!! yeah!!! and testing the speed…that of course is not full because of the PCIe 3.0 limitation but already super great!!! :)))
END EDIT
My next step is to clone my Win7 with Macrium to the 990 SSD disk and then install Clover to make the boot from USB and then run a super new fast system with the nvme!!!
Hope it will work!
Can’t believe it is really solved so quickly thanks to your help wow! 