960 EVO BSOD & BIOS Hang

TanC wrote: Hello, I've just purchased a Samsung 960 EVO 1TB SSD. I'm plugging it in to my ASRock Gaming I7, which has an I7-6900K CPU. I already have a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB drive which will be replaced by the 960. The 950 Pro has already been upgraded to the NVMe drivers v2.0.0.1607. I created an image using Macrium Reflect. Replaced the 950 with the 960 and restored the image. When I boot the system gets a BSOD. The screen flashes so quick I cannot read anything. If I go into the BIOS the mouse will move, but everything else is frozen. No F-keys work, I can't do anything. Originally I had Fast boot set to "Fast". That disables access to the CSM options. I disabled fast boot and found Storage Oprom was set to Legacy only. I change it to UEFI only and tried again. Same results. OS is Windows 7 x64. Can any one please assist with getting this SSD working. Preferably, without having to reinstall W7 from scratch. thanks

Sorry to hear you're having these problems, but I must say... WOW, you have a lot going on here!!

Before anything else, I pray for your sake you haven't done anything to your Win 7 installation and files on the 950 Pro. Your chances of recovering your Win 7 installation depends upon it being still intact on the 950 Pro. If you don't have the Win 7 installation on the 950 Pro, you've most likely have a fresh Win 7 installation in your future, sorry to say.

Next I will scold you, for you own good.    When doing something as critical and precise as imaging an OS to a new drive, the PC should be in as stable a state as possible. You did not mention any CPU or memory OC, but you were using Fast Boot. Fast Boot is actually Fast POST, it reduces the time of the POST procedure. Nothing is free, and reducing POST time risks adequate POST testing and initialization of hardware. Particularly on an X99 system, that POST's slow due to its complexity. In the future, when doing things like imaging a drive, don't have the UEFI options configured for speed instead of stability.

So many ifs and variables in this situation, and missing details. Yes I know it would take a long time to put them all in a post, but it's either now or later...

You "restored" an image of the OS from the 950 Pro, to the 960 Pro. Why an image restore and not a clone of the 950 to the 960? You have two Ultra M.2 slots, and a CPU with plenty of PCIe lanes.

Was the 960 Pro formatted before the image copy? If so, MBR or GPT?

Are you certain that the 950 Pro image had ALL of the partitions on it, to be copied to the other drive? Depending upon how you installed Win 7 (UEFI booting?), it would have three or four partitions.

I haven't used Macrium in a while, I found I cannot trust image copies or even clones to new drives, they always seem to never be quite perfect. When Macrium does the image restore, does it restart the PC and do its work outside of Windows? Or just finishes it on the restart? Either way, I have a feeling having Fast Boot set to Fast caused at least some if not most of your problems.

About the CSM option, and the Launch Storage OpROM Policy option setting, did you originally have that set to UEFI Only? If you did, unless you fixed the EFI boot loader file location in your Win 7 installation media, you would not be using the Windows EFI boot loader.

The 950 Pro has its own EFI Option ROM built in, which allows it to be used with Windows 7, without fixing the location of the Win 7 EFI boot loader file. The question is, does the 960 Pro also have its own EFI Option ROM built in. I assume it will, but that is not 100% verified until the 960 Pro's white paper is checked.

How is your 950 Pro formatted? MBR or GPT?

Next, the apparent corruption of the UEFI, which may not actually be the case, is a side affect of the failed boot of the 960 Pro. Like the situation when installing Windows on a new drive, and a wireless mouse and keyboard don't work well, or at all? Same thing for wired keyboards and mouse that needs its software installed before it will fully function?

Did you get into the UEFI to check the boot order before the 960 Pro attempted to boot the first time? Such as, you will have a "Windows Boot Manager" entry for the 960 Pro, as well as one like, "AHCI: Samsung 960 Pro"?

Regardless of all of this, put the 950 Pro back into the PC, without the 960 Pro. Clear the UEFI/BIOS with the CMOS jumper, start the PC, and set your basic UEFI options, but NO Fast Boot. Let the PC boot at least once with the 950 Pro. Then put the 960 Pro into the board, start the PC into the UEFI to confirm booting from the 950 Pro. Boot from the 950 Pro, and wipe (clean) the 960 Pro with diskpart, unless you are 100% certain you can secure erase it with the Magician software.

Before you proceed, check Device Manager, Storage Controllers. You should see two entries for Samsung NVMe controller. NVMe SSDs have their own NVMe controller built into the drive, unlike SATA drives that use the board's SATA controller. I have two Intel 750 NVMe SSDs in my ASRock X99 board, and each has its own entry in Storage Controllers, with the Intel NVMe driver.

At least part of your problem may be the 960 Pro attempting to use the 950 Pro's Storage Controllers entry of the 950's image. Or Win 7 was not able to install the Samsung NVMe driver for the 960's NVMe controller for some reason. This may be critical for an image to work (if it can), to have an entry in Storage Controllers for the 960 Pro.

Then try to clone the 950 to the 960. Possibly not supported? I'm not sure, is that why you used an image "restore"?