H77M + PCIe SSD nvme AIC

Nunyerbusiness wrote: http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/H77M/?cat=Specifications I know it's an old board but I have a spare Toshiba OCZ RD400 (on PCIe AIC) I want to boot from, but there's nothing in BIOS.  I know Win10 is compatible, but I could not even do a fresh install because it says drive isn't bootable because of BIOS??  Any help?

Whatever displayed the message about the RD400 being not bootable because of the BIOS is correct.

Your board does not have a UEFI version that supports NVMe, which is a new storage protocol, different than SATA, that is used by the RD400, and other NVMe SSDs. A board's UEFI/BIOS must have NVMe support, or you cannot use an RD400 as the OS drive.

One or two ASRock Z77 boards have a Beta UEFI version that supports NVMe. My Z77 Extreme4 is one of those boards, and I did test using an Intel 750 NVMe SSD in it as the OS drive. That Beta UEFI works to a degree, but the only way to get into the UEFI UI once it is configured for UEFI booting is to clear it with the CMOS jumper or CLR CMOS button. Otherwise the usual pressing the Del key or using the Restart to UEFI program causes POST to fail,

You can ask ASRock support for a special UEFI/BIOS update for your board that includes NVMe support, but I cannot guarantee you will get it, here:

http://event.asrock.com/tsd.asp

NVMe drives will not appear in the UEFI/BIOS with the SATA drives, since they are not SATA drives. Only the newest boards have UEFIs that have an NVMe Configuration screen, that really only lists them at this point. The only place you will see your RD400 is in the System Browser tool in the UEFI Tools screen, if your board has that option.

When you install Windows 10, you'll need to do it from a USB flash drive created from a Windows 10 ISO file. When you use that USB installation media, you must select an entry in the boot order for the USB flash drive that is, "UEFI: <flash drive name>". Otherwise, the installation will fail.

If you are using a video card, you'll need to put the RD400 AIC card in the PCIE2 slot. That slot is a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot. All NVMe SSDs use a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface for full performance, so you won't get the rated read speed from your RD400 in the PCIE2 slot.

Also, unless you have an Ivy Bridge i5 or i7 CPU, the PCIE1 slot won't provide PCIe 3.0 support.