Samsung SM951-AHCI 512GB on Z97 Extreme6
Printed From: ASRock.com
Category: Technical Support
Forum Name: Intel Motherboards
Forum Description: Question about ASRock Intel Motherboards
URL: https://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=161
Printed Date: 22 Nov 2024 at 8:00am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: Samsung SM951-AHCI 512GB on Z97 Extreme6
Posted By: gniblack
Subject: Samsung SM951-AHCI 512GB on Z97 Extreme6
Date Posted: 21 May 2015 at 9:32am
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I see the device in the UEFI. However, I have not found a way to make the computer boot to the device. It doesn't detect a boot device after attempting to boot into Windows 8.1. I previously installed Windows 8.1 to a Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB, and I used Paragon Migrate OS to SSD 4.0 to migrate my data from the SSD to my new m.2 device. This process appeared to complete successfully so I do not understand what did not work. Has anyone gotten this to work?
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Replies:
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 21 May 2015 at 2:09pm
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My SM951 is the OS drive in my Z97Extreme6 PC. I did a fresh installation that uses the EFI boot loader supplied with Windows 8/8.1, which is required to allow booting from a SM951. But there is another way to get it working, if your previous OS installation will cooperate. Was it and now the SM951 formatted as GPT? First, what UEFI version are you using? UEFI version 2.10 is the official update to allow booting from a SM951. You won't see that specifically in the description, but it is the UEFI version you must use. If that alone does not fix your booting problem, we'll see what the answer to my question is, and take it from there. The SM951 has very specific requirements that must be met or it won't work. It's not a plug and play device, which is why it is not sold in the usual retail channels. It seems you are not aware of this. |
Posted By: gniblack
Date Posted: 21 May 2015 at 11:49pm
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Thank you for the response. I am using the latest UEFI version 2.10. I have a feeling that I also set it up as a master boot record (MBR) rather than a GUID Partition Tabel (GPT). How do I confirm this? I was aware that it wasn't sold in the usual retail channels, but I didn't realize that I lacked the knowledge to configure this device successfully to boot into Windows. I really had just been looking forward to getting one of these devices after building my system with the ASRock Z97 Extreme6 motherboard and look forward to one day getting the NVMe version. Thanks for your help.
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Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 22 May 2015 at 3:47pm
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Open Device Manager, and then Disk Drives, and open the Properties for your SM951. Select the Volumes tab, and click the Populate button near the bottom. You will see something similar to this:  MBR partitioning is the default type used by the Windows installation program. If the drive you cloned from was partitioned as MBR, then your SM951 will be the same. |
Posted By: ASRock_TSD
Date Posted: 22 May 2015 at 9:44pm
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Greetings, this is ASRock Technical Support Department. Due to the SM951 limitation(also on XP941), please install the OS in SM951 with GPT(UEFI) mode. (Boot -> Press F11 -> Select the OS installation device(such as USB storage) title as UEFI)  Kindest Regards, ASRock TSD
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Posted By: gniblack
Date Posted: 23 May 2015 at 3:15am
| You were correct in thinking that the partition was configured in the default style of a Master Boot Record (MBR). Do I need to start all over, or is there a trick to convert it to a GUID Partition Table? |
Posted By: gniblack
Date Posted: 23 May 2015 at 10:49am
| I used Rufus to create a bootable Windows 8 USB flash drive with a GPT partition scheme for UEFI computer. I have had no success in making the motherboard boot from this flash drive though, and I attempted using two devices. One I made used NTFS and the other FAT32. I looked through the BIOS settings and thought maybe that I needed to change the advanced USB setting to UEFI, but that did not help. I also changed everything from Legacy to UEFI. What settings do I need to use to make this work? |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 23 May 2015 at 7:46pm
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Using Rufus should work, but use FAT32 for formatting. The USB flash drive should be in one of the USB ports on the board's IO panel on the back of the PC. Start over with the UEFI/BIOS settings, select Load UEFI Defaults in the Exit screen. Then in the Boot screen, at the bottom find the option CSM. Click on that to open that screen. Find the Launch Storage OpROM Policy option, and select UEFI Only. Go back to Exit screen, select Save and Exit. Then go right back into the UEFI/BIOS. Now select the entry for the USB flash drive that has "UEFI:" in it. Then select Save and Exit on the Exit screen and it should boot the Win 8 installer on the flash drive. It is important to ONLY have the SM951 connected to the board, all other SSDs or HDDs should have their power cables removed during the Win 8 installation. When the Win 8 installation begins, select the Custom Installation option. If the SM951 appears with any partitions on it, delete them with the options on that screen. After the SM951 has no partitions left, click the New button on that screen. You'll see a message about Windows creating extra partitions, just click Ok. You then should have four partitions on the SM 951. If the main partition is not highlighted, select it. Now continue the installation. Let us know how this works out for you. |
Posted By: gniblack
Date Posted: 23 May 2015 at 8:44pm
| Whoops! I meant to say UEFI settings. I am so used to dealing with BIOS. I actually only tried the front USB ports so I will follow your instructions this evening when I get home from work. Thank you. |
Posted By: TIJ
Date Posted: 24 May 2015 at 3:03am
| I've got a similar question to ASRock Technical Support... I'm planning to use the Samsung SM951 drive with the ASRock X99E-ITX/ac system board. Will it be possible to boot from the SM951? |
Posted By: gniblack
Date Posted: 24 May 2015 at 6:25am
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Parsec, I tried following your instructions, but I received the same error, which states: Recovery Your PC needs to be repaired An unexpected error has occurred. Error code: 0xc0000225 You'll need to use recovery tools on your installation media. If you don't have any installation media (like a disc or USB device), contact your system administrator or PC manufacturer. |
Posted By: gniblack
Date Posted: 24 May 2015 at 6:52am
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I actually had tried a USB device that was 128 GB and required Large FAT32 instead of just FAT32. I tried it again with an 8 GB flash drive and did not have any error. I think it will work now. I am so excited now. Should I be able to clone my MBR to the GPT once this is done? |
Posted By: gniblack
Date Posted: 24 May 2015 at 7:28am
| The installation did complete successfully, but I do not understand how to clone my Samsung SSD 850 PRO 256GB (with MBR) to the SAMSUNG MZPV512HDGL-00000, 476.9 GB (with GPT) without deleting the 4 partitions. Unfortunately, it seems that I wasted money on Paragon Migrate OS to SSD. |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 24 May 2015 at 11:26am
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Glad that finally worked for you. I want to verify that you needed to set the CSM option for the Storage OROM to UEFI only. Did you maintain that setting during your installation attempts? Cloning software works by copying from a source drive to an empty destination drive. The MBR and GPT partitions contain the addresses of every data block on a drive. Those addresses are used by the file system of the OS. GPT formatting is more advanced than MBR formatting. Non-SATA drives like the SM951 require a GPT partition in order to be used as an OS drive. Don't forget that the SM951 is a PCIe SSD, whose PCIe lanes are provided by the CPU. Standard SATA drives are connected to the board's chipset (Z97 for your board) which contains the SATA interface. The SM951 does not use the SATA interface in the Z97 chipset. The GPT formatting and use of that CSM option in the UEFI/BIOS is not something that conditions the SM951 to become an OS drive. Those things make it possible for it to boot an OS. Remove either or both of these things, and it won't boot an OS. Don't forget if you do a UEFI/BIOS update, which sets all the options to their default values, or manually set the options to their default values, that CSM option will no longer be set to UEFI only. If that happens, your OS won't boot until you set that option to UEFI only. All of this is why you cannot clone an MBR partition based OS installation to a SM951. Well, you can do that of course, but it won't boot the OS. I'm sorry the few places that sell the SM951 don't make all this clear. Actually, one of them does, RamCity, or at least they provide some installation instructions. Reviews of the SM951 at best barely mention the special requirements needed for booting an OS from it. If you find migrating software that states it supports GPT and UEFI or EFI booting, then it might work. It must be capable of converting MBR addressing to GPT addressing. Be very careful about that, saying it supports GPT is not enough. |
Posted By: gniblack
Date Posted: 24 May 2015 at 11:38am
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I downloaded Clonezilla and am giving it a try. Hopefully I know what I am doing here. Edit: no success with it. I will wait for some advice. |
Posted By: gniblack
Date Posted: 24 May 2015 at 11:54am
| I did maintain the setting during my installation attempts. Also disconnecting all of my devices and following your exact instructions I was able to succeed. I just could not use Large FAT32. It actually had to be FAT32. |
Posted By: gniblack
Date Posted: 24 May 2015 at 11:59am
| It's not the end of the world for me to reload all of my software. It is just disappointing. At least I have it all readily available. |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 24 May 2015 at 7:54pm
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Good outlook to have frankly, I go with fresh installations personally. Normally takes a few days to get things where you want them to be. Unless someone has a major insight into some new cloning software, I think you might as well start installing your software. |
Posted By: Schlunze
Date Posted: 25 May 2015 at 6:04pm
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Hello, @gniblack had similar problems with win7 uefi installation. For me it worked to dd the system partition (c:) with a linux of your choice on another ssd. Bootloader entry and Windows EFI existed due to an previous installation on the target disk. This disk was already partitoned by myself before first windows installation in the following scheme: gpt 512MB EFI 128MB Microsoft reserved... 50GB NTFS ... The img shoud be smaller than your new partition (40G in my case). Resizing ntfs-fs can be done with win administration tools. For me it is a great fallback solution without the need of reinstalling things. |
Posted By: ASRock_TSD
Date Posted: 26 May 2015 at 6:52pm
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The X99E-ITX/ac supports SM951/XP941 M.2 SSD, please be confident to use it. If any, please feel free to let us know. Kindest regards, ASRock TSD |
Posted By: rnclapp
Date Posted: 29 May 2015 at 4:23pm
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I am about to purchase an AS Rock Extreme 6 mobo and 128 GB Samsung SM951 M.2 SSD which I plan to use exclusively for Win 10 once released The website states that the mobo is compatible with the 256 and 512 GB ACHI versions. Any reason why the 128 ACHI version will or will not work? Also can you confirm that you plan to provide support to the 128 GB (and higher) versions of the NVMe SM951 in due course
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Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 01 Jun 2015 at 9:53pm
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There should be no problem using the 128GB AHCI version of the SM951. It is not included in the list because ASRock did not specifically test that capacity. The basic compatibility enhancements of the 2.10 UEFI will work with any capacity AHCI SM951. Reviews of the NVMe version of the SM951, using Windows 8.1, have shown a problem with the Microsoft native NVMe driver. Basically, it causes reduced write performance. Whether or not Win 10 will have an updated NVMe driver is unknown, at least AFAIK now. The ASRock Z97 Extreme6 has had two UEFI updates for NVMe support. I have not personally used any of the few NVMe SSDs that currently exist with my Z97 Extreme6, so I cannot verify they work perfectly. Check reviews of NVMe SSDs (by Intel and Samsung) for compatibility. |
Posted By: ianh82
Date Posted: 03 Jun 2015 at 6:14am
 i'm having major issues, nothing i do, and i've followed all your guides on this thread, work. tried several usb sticks, and all the same, no boot screens or selecting EUFI usb drive works. just blank screens. ------------- Everton FC |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 03 Jun 2015 at 11:34am
We need to know what hardware you are using, since not every mother board can support the SM951. I assume that is what you are trying to use, you did not mention the drive. What video source are you using, a video card or integrated graphics? If you use a video card, and depending upon the configuration in the UEFI/BIOS for the SM951, your video card might not support what is called GOP, a UEFI graphics protocol. Since you gave us no details, I can only suggest trying the integrated graphics on your PC, if available. Otherwise, you can get into the UEFI/BIOS, and you find a boot entry that is, "UEFI: flash drive name", correct? So you only get blank screens when trying to boot from the Windows installation USB flash drive? I have had problems with large USB flash drives, such as 64GB models. They must be formatted as exFAT, but Windows must be on a flash drive formatted as FAT32. That cannot be done on large flash drives. A 8, 16, or 32GB flash drive works fine formatted as FAT32. What OS or version of Windows are you using? |
ianh82 wrote:Posted By: ianh82
Date Posted: 03 Jun 2015 at 3:07pm
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asrock z97 extreme 6 bios 2.30 intel i5 4690k @ stock 16 gig of kingston hyper x beast 2400 mhz ram 256 gig sammy SM951 pci-e ssd drive usb drives used: 8 gig data traveller 16 gig generic brand both formatted fat32 in rufus. windows 8.1 pro 64 bit. iso burned with rufus. when im in the bios i get usb: ************ and also EUFI: (usb) ********** pressing F11 and selecting EUFI does nothing and when its selected in the bios and boots to it, black screen with flashing cursor top left and then error messages about inserting boot media. mr GPU, which is not in the case, is a GTX 970 EVGA OC edition. i had 4 hard drives and 1 ssd which are all removed. basically, its the mobo, ram, CPU and SSD on the mobo and thats it. all opticals are excluded too. a funny thing is that i took out the SM951 and then connected my original boot drive, a 128 gig kingston SSD which was working fine, no longer boots! ------------- Everton FC |
Posted By: sitedude
Date Posted: 27 Jun 2015 at 6:34am
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Hi! I have also a problem by installing Windows 7 Prof 64 Bit on my Z97 Extreme6 with Samsung SM951 My components: 2048MB KFA2 GeForce GTX 750 Ti EX OC Aktiv PCIe 3.0 x16 2xDVI/1xHDMI/1xDisplayPort (Retail) 256GB Samsung SM951 M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 32Gb/s MLC Toggle (MZHPV256HDGM-00000) ASRock Z97 Extreme6 Intel Z97 So.1150 Dual Channel DDR3 ATX Retail Intel Core i7 4790 4x 3.60GHz So.1150 BOX 32GB (4x 8192MB) Corsair Vengeance schwarz DDR3-1600 DIMM CL10-10-10-27 Quad Kit I tried to install from my original cd but it just loops on this "start" with the microsoft logo coming together from 4 pieces.. How can I install Windows 7?? |
Posted By: Gunslinger
Date Posted: 27 Jun 2015 at 7:01am
| anyone had any luck with an AHCI SM951 in an adapter and used on a z87 board, with windows 7 ..... and be bootable ? |
Posted By: Xaltar
Date Posted: 27 Jun 2015 at 12:14pm
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For those using intel 9 series boards you need the latest bios update in order to support NVMe. NVMe support is whats needed to allow booting from the SM951 and other NVMe drives. |
Posted By: sitedude
Date Posted: 27 Jun 2015 at 5:41pm
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looks like somebody got it.. http://forums.tweaktown.com/asrock/60639-sm951-asrock-z97-extreme6-boots-but-running-slow.html" rel="nofollow - http://forums.tweaktown.com/asrock/60639-sm951-asrock-z97-extreme6-boots-but-running-slow.html But I don't understand how to get this working :/ |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 28 Jun 2015 at 7:03pm
Sorry, but this is not correct. The SM951 SSD that has been available for a while now is not a NVMe SSD. For lack of a better term it is an AHCI SSD, since it uses the standard Windows AHCI driver (msahci or in Win 8/10 storahci) rather than a NVMe driver. The confusion is caused in the case of the Z97 Extreme6, for example, in that the UEFI version needed to boot from a SM951 is 2.10 (or beyond) whose description is: 1.Update microcode, ME and VBIOS. 2.Add NVME support I can assure everyone that NVMe support is not what allows you to boot from a SM951. The Beta UEFI version for the Z97 Extreme6 that allows booting from the SM951 has this description: Improve M.2 compatibility. |
Posted By: Xaltar
Date Posted: 28 Jun 2015 at 8:05pm
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Thanks Parsec, I took a look again online and found http://www.anandtech.com/show/8979/samsung-sm951-512-gb-review" rel="nofollow - this and you are correct, while the SM951 was originally slated to have NVMe support, the final released product it would appear does not. The original article I found seems to have been a review on a pre-release version of the SM951 and thus caused my confusion. Thanks, I will update the SM951 boot thread. It seems that support to boot from the SM951 was added along side NVMe support (and not mentioned in the bios update notes).
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