Z97E-ITX/ac: SSD M.2 don't boot

Windscythe wrote: Please update if you find a solution. I know that the Toshiba (OCZ) RC100 is still fairly new. Hopefully it just needs Bios update from ASRock to work. It's currently disappointing that I can't get it to work as a boot drive at the moment considering it's one of, if not the only 2242 Nvme drives available.  On a side note, the Z97 platform does say that I should be able to get 10gb/s on the M.2 slot. It appears as though I'm only getting around 6-7gb/s and that it's not a limitation of the drive itself but of the interface on the board. Is there a setting that I'm not seeing. I did set it to Force M.2.

I agree that this is very much most likely a BIOS issue on the the side of ASRock. This is a new drive, but is very likely to be a very popular drive since it's the only NVME based 2242 M.2 SSD that I know of. Hopefully ASRock will update the BIOS so that this M.2 Device can be detected from within BIOS. 

So....and update. I basically gave up on getting the bios to give me a boot option for the Toshiba RC100 NVME M.2 Drive, even though I was able to install Windows 10 on it. So I left the drive in, but went to install Windows 10 on my 850 Evo Sata SSD. Windows 10 would go through the motions of installing itself on the SSD, but it wouldn't fully install on it and so it wouldn't boot. Finally after several attempts and several different BIOS settings, I went ahead and locked the M.2 Drive option into Force SATA Express just to turn it off, without having to take the motherboard out and removing it physically. 

Windscythe wrote: Well. I got it working. I'm not sure what the rules are here, and if we're allowed to talk about Bios Modification, but the bottom line is I was able to get the Toshiba RC100 NVME Drive to work as a boot drive on my Z97e-itx/ac.  It wasn't very difficult, so if it's allowed to talking about Bios modification here, let me know and I'll post what I did. Otherwise feel free to message me.

Windscythe wrote: There is a post somewhere else that I was able to find:  "How-to-get-full-NVMe-support-for-all-Systems-with-an-AMI-UEFI-BIOS" This process was apparently designed so that people could get NVME support for 6-8 series chipset support. In fact this is pulled directly from the post.  Nearly all mainboard manufacturers are meanwhile offering new BIOS versions with full NVMe support for their mainboards with an Intel 9-Series or X99 Chipset. So even though 9 Series has Nvme support, for some reason this board, does not have nvme support for this specific Nvme drive. I wasn't even sure that this would work, and was very pleasantly surprised once I went through the whole process and it did work.  So a few things of importance to note. Obviously altering a BIOS carries risks and the possibility of bricking your motherboard. So if you aren't willing to take that risk on yourself, I wouldn't recommend doing this. So I'm not personally advocating that anyone do this, I'm simply sharing my experience.  Things of note: I used the program by CodeRush called "UEFITool v0.25.1" I used the NvmExpressDxe_4.ffs to insert NVME support into the 2.20 BIOS file from ASRock After following the instructions from that original post, I quickly learned that the ASRock Instant Flash would deny the flash attempt with the Modded BIOS, so I searched again and found another informative post by looking up:  [Guide] How to flash a modded AMI UEFI BIOS I then scrolled down to the section for ASRock mainboards with AMI Aptio UEFI BIOS After I completed that portion, I was able to flash the new modded bios and BAM, not only was I able to install Windows 10 WITH Secure Boot and Keys Loaded, CSM Disabled, but it loaded into it perfectly. I am even able to use ULTRA FAST BOOT with the drive.  If you have any questions, just let me know. If you want me to walk you through what I did over Discord, just message me and I'll send a link.