x399 Professional m.2 slot bad

I just RMA'd the x399 Professional Fatal1ty Gaming motherboard, and it solved my 128GB RAM problem. However, now my m2_3 slot appears to be bad as it no longer recognizes either of my Samsung 850 EVOs.

Does anyone have ideas. Could it be a RAM conflict? I am running bios 2.0 (latest). Let me know what additional info to supply. The other two m.2 slots are working fine.

Hi,

I have tried two good Samsung sata 3 850 evo ssds in the bad m2_3 slot, and moved the non-recognized ssd from the m2_3 slot to the m2_2 slot. The ssds both tested good in slot m2_2, and slot m2_1 is also good (960 pro nvme 512gb), but m2_3 does not recognize either of the 850 Evos 500gb.

I have yet to try my Samsung 960 pro 512gb in the bad m2_3 slot, and still need to try some slot swapping to make sure the m2_3 is bad. Also, it is extremely difficult to get the screws back in to secure the ssds.

After replacing the motherboard, with only 32gb of ram installed, all m.2 ssd slots were recognized and functional to the best of my recollection. I noticed in windows device manager that there was a non-present (phantom) m.2 ssd, so it was there at least once.

I notice in hardware monitor, that it shows a valid temperatue for the slot, so this is confusing.

However, at some point (now I have 128gb ram), the m2_3 ssd slot stopped being recognized and I am wondering if I should just rma one of the ssds and take the loss because another rma of the motherboard is too much to deal with.

I have an inquiry to ASRock support, but am overall very disappointed with the way things have turned out.

On a side note, I created two raid0 arrays last night with two 2.5 inch 850 evo ssds, and two Toshiba x300 5tb hdds., and now my one good m.2 85o evo sata ssd is not showing in device manager or disk management, and this is also a problem.

Any new ideas?

Thanks much,

Bryan


Edited by jbmerrill - 26 Jan 2018 at 11:23pm

[URL=][/URL]Hi MisterJ

This is a very belated reply, but I got my system running well with a couple of exceptions as follows:


I put the Samsung 960 Pro in m2_3, and the two 850 Evos in m2_1 and m2_2 and was able to create SATA arrays just fine using RaidExpert on both my m.2 and 2.5 inch ssds (the 960 pro is a stand alone nvme drive). However, as I remember it, I could not install Windows on the 850 evos, and instead used paragon hard disk manager to restore a copy of the 960 pro partition to the 850s (raid0). Now, I am not sure of this, because when I think about it, I don't see that the 960 pro install would have the raid drivers????

I tried again last night to install Windows 10 pro x64 to my 850 evo ssd array, but got an error (windows detected that the efi partition was formatted as ntfs instead of fat32), which is bogus because I verified it was fat32, so I am still confused about how to actually install windows on the 850 evo ssds.

Also, I have not been able to get ultrafast boot to work. It either does not do anything, or when it does almost work, it immediately posts and starts to boot windows, but freezes (windows 10=black screen), windows8.1=efi bootloader missing message?).

I use easybcd to manage multibooting. My Windows boot times are very slow, and just bios times alone exceed30-60 seconds, making the total boot to desktop times about 2 minutes.

I do have several usb devices attached, and found that when I switch them off on the usb hubs, that my boot times greatly improve, so not sure yet what I am going to do, except to get a large hub perhaps, and connect most of them to it.

I also have an Oculus VR headset attached.

I welcome any advice on how to troubleshoot these problems and ask what additional info. I may need to supply to facilitate this.

Thanks for your replies and assistance.

Bryan M.

Edited by jbmerrill - 18 May 2018 at 9:58pm

Hello,

Somehow, I was able to get win 10 installed on the 850 evo raid0 array, as I remember, I used a dvd in combination with an easybcd winpe install from my hard drive.

My main problem now, is how to get ultrafast boot to work. There is no 'fast boot', only ultrafast, and my system begins to load windows, and immediately freezes. Sometimes I see the error message about the winload.efi file not being accessible / found.

I have tried with secure boot enabled, and of course csm disabled, and nothing works. I have tried using both the metro gui loader, as well as the non gui, plain text windows boot loader.

Any ideas on what to try with this? Let me know what additional info. I should supply.

Thanks,

Bryan