HELP! Z77 Extreme 6 not boot from UEFI SM951

JC-Logger wrote: I assume you read Parsec's lengthy post about how to install Windows onto an M.2  PCIe SSD.  I think it is here http://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=1236&title=how-to-install-windows-on-a-pcie-ssd I just did one and it came up fine.  My mboard has 2.4 pre-installed.  If you followed the instructions carefully, I would suspect the 2.80 Beta.  Not a lot of help, I know.

I'm glad my tutorial on using PCIe SSDs as boot drives helped you, apparently.

Yes your post is helpful. It tells me the 2.80 UEFI version is not necessary for the SM951. You are using UEFI 2.40, right? The AHCI SM951 and XP941 are the simplest of the PCIe SSDs to use as boot drives.

We don't know enough about the OP's UEFI configuration with the SM951 to conclude that the 2.80 UEFI is the problem.

The OP did not say which PCIe slot is being used. If the PCIE5 slot has the adapter card in it, that is a PCIe 2.0 slot whose lanes are provided by the Z77 chipset. That might cause a problem with the adapter, and will reduce the performance of a SM951, since the slot is PCIe 2.0 x4.

We don't know how the OP formatted the SM951, I usually allow the Windows installation program to do that in the Custom installation option.

We also do not know what the OP did with the CSM option. Was the Launch Storage OpROM policy option set to UEFI Only, with CSM Enabled, or was CSM Disabled?

The entry for the SM951, or any PCIe SSD (or standard SSD using the EFI boot loader), in the Boot order should be Windows Boot Manager.

The first board I ever installed Windows using the EFI boot loader is the ASRock Z77 Extreme4. That was in 2012. That was with standard SATA SSDs.

The same method I wrote about will work for SATA SSDs and AHCI PCIe SSDs (AHCI PCIe SSDs not in RAID), and with a small or no difference, NVMe SSDs.

An aside but related to this: When you purchase an NVMe PCIe 950 Pro SSD, the information included in the package tells you absolutely nothing about using it as an OS drive. It is interesting how mother board manufactures seem to inherit most of the responsibility of educating the users of these SSDs about using them as OS drives, as well as making it possible to USE them as OS drives. IMO, mother board manufactures have done a much better job of the latter than the former. But mother board manufactures have done so much more than the source of the 950 Pro, SM951, etc.

I assume you read Parsec's lengthy post about how to install Windows onto an M.2  PCIe SSD.  I think it is here

http://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=1236&title=how-to-install-windows-on-a-pcie-ssd

I just did one and it came up fine.  My mboard has 2.4 pre-installed.  If you followed the instructions carefully, I would suspect the 2.80 Beta. 

Not a lot of help, I know.