X99-WS, SM951 NVMe, Windows 10 Oddities

Ok, in one last attempt to try and get the WinRE image booting from my SM951 NVMe drive , I wondered if the winre.wim was missing some drivers (I can dream) ... So i thought I would create a custom winre.wim and see if the helped.

First off, to create some folders:

md e:\mount
md e:\mount\drivers
md e:\mount\drivers\1
md e:\mount\drivers\2
md e:\mount\drivers\3
md e:\mount\drivers\4
md e:\mount\drivers\5
md e:\mount\drivers\6
md e:\mount\winre

I Put Winre.wim in e:\mount, I put a clean copy of REAgent.xml in e:\mount, I put the Samsung NVMe drivers in e:\mount\drivers, as I could not be bothered to work out which was required, I took the six sets of drivers from the Samsung NVMe Driver 1.1 Exe and put them in individual folders, hence the folders 1 to 6.  

I then mounted the winre image:

Dism /mount-image /imagefile:e:\mount\winre.wim /index:1 /mountdir:e:\mount\winre

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.10586.0

Mounting image
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Added the unsigned Samsung NVMe drivers:

E:\mount>Dism /Image:e:\mount\winre /Add-Driver /Driver:e:\Mount\Drivers /forceunsigned /recurse

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.10586.0

Image Version: 10.0.10586.0

Searching for driver packages to install...
Found 6 driver package(s) to install.
Installing 1 of 6 - e:\Mount\Drivers\1\nvme.inf: The driver package was successfully installed.
Installing 2 of 6 - e:\Mount\Drivers\2\nvme.inf: The driver package was successfully installed.
Installing 3 of 6 - e:\Mount\Drivers\3\nvme.inf: The driver package was successfully installed.
Installing 4 of 6 - e:\Mount\Drivers\4\nvme.inf: The driver package was successfully installed.
Installing 5 of 6 - e:\Mount\Drivers\5\nvme.inf: The driver package was successfully installed.
Installing 6 of 6 - e:\Mount\Drivers\6\nvme.inf: The driver package was successfully installed.
The operation completed successfully.

Once complete, I unmounted the modified wim:

E:\mount>DISM /Unmount-Wim /MountDir:e:\Mount\winre /Commit

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.10586.0

Image File : e:\mount\winre.wim
Image Index : 1
Saving image
[==========================100.0%==========================]
Unmounting image
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Ok now time to get the new modified WinRE.wim on to the dedicated recovery partition:

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          476 GB      0 B        *
  Disk 1    Online          238 GB      0 B
  Disk 2    Online         1863 GB  1024 KB        *
  Disk 3    Online          931 GB  1024 KB
  Disk 4    No Media           0 B      0 B

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Recovery           450 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    System             100 MB   451 MB
  Partition 3    Reserved            16 MB   551 MB
  Partition 4    Primary            476 GB   567 MB

DISKPART> select partition 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> assign letter="R"

DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.

DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

E:\mount>r:

Disable WinRE:

R:\>reagentc /disable
REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

Get rid of the Existing Recovery Files:

R:\>rd Recovery /q /s

Recreate the WinRE Directories:

R:\>mkdir Recovery

R:\>mkdir Recovery\WindowsRE

Copy across the modified wim:

R:\>xcopy /H e:\Mount\Winre.wim R:\Recovery\WindowsRE\
E:\Mount\winre.wim
1 File(s) copied

And the clean xml:

R:\>xcopy /H e:\mount\ReAgent.xml R:\Recovery\WindowsRE\
E:\mount\ReAgent.xml
1 File(s) copied

Set the path to winre.wim:

R:\>Reagentc /setreimage /path r:\Recovery\WindowsRE
Directory set to: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition1\Recovery\WindowsRE

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

Re-enable:

R:\>Reagentc /enable
REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

And then i tried to reboot in to winre ............. But failed , with exactly the same 0xc00000bb error.

I really have tried as much as I can , so can ASROCK Tech support please come up with some ideas. Windows 10 installs to and runs fine from the SM951 .... it is just this WinRE Environment that fails to work.

An SM951, or any NVMe PCIe SSD runs with a UEFI rather than a Legacy boot loader. You have either Launch Storage OpROM Policy set to UEFI Only, or CSM set to Disabled, in order to be able to install Windows and boot from an NVMe SSD.

Among the four partitions on your SM951 is a semi-hidden Legacy MBR partition that Windows includes along with the UEFI GPT partition. That is included so legacy Windows utilities like the Windows memory test will still run.

This configuration works with SATA drives, since a SATA drive can boot in both a Legacy and UEFI environment. An NVMe SSD cannot boot in a Legacy environment, only in a UEFI environment.

My question is, does the Windows RE software need to run in the legacy environment? Or put another way, can it run in the UEFI environment? I don't know if it can or not. This is the question that needs an answer from MS, to either stop you from wasting your time (if it cannot) or to find another answer (if it can.)

Just a little update, I still have heard nothing back from ASRock tech support whether it be an email or via this forum post. But I did notice recently, from Parsec's forum post, that the new BIOSes for the soon to be released Broadwell-E CPUs have arrived.

Even though I do not intend to replace my Haswell-E with a Broadwell-E , I thought I would update the BIOS to 3.10 in another attempt to get my issue resolved.

So, I downloaded and extracted the ROM to a USB Pen, rebooted into UEFI and did an instant flash update. A couple of reboots later having put my BIOS settings back to how they were, I was in Windows 10 again.

I disabled the existing recovery environment and ran through the config again to ensure it was set to use a partition on my NVMe drive.

The moment of truth, I ran  "reagentc.exe /boottore" from an elevated command prompt and rebooted............

And what do you know it worked. It booted in to the recovery options absolutely fine. As there have been some Windows 10 rollups released which I have applied , I cannot for certain say whether it was just down to the bios update.

But my NVMe and ASRock X99 WS seem to be working as they should at the moment , my issue is resolved.


Edited by GuruNot - 28 Mar 2016 at 9:30pm