@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!