Intel Motherboards : SM951 as OS boot device information

Author: parsec
Subject: SM951 as OS boot device information
Posted: 07 Feb 2017 at 9:33am

Gambit wrote: Hi,  After many days of trying to get my Samsung 960 EVO NVME M.2 SSD configured as a boot drive I seem to keep getting stuck at the same point. Where I get a Recovery screen with Error Code: windows\system32\winload.efi 0xc0000225 Configuration: Z77 Extreme4 with P2.90M bios update Samsung 960 EVO NVME M.2 in PCIE3 via a PCIE Adaptor (Shows in System Browser as Mass Storage Controller) CMS is enabled  Launch Storage OpROM policy is UEFI only Latest Samsung NVME 2.1 Controller driver installed I installed windows 10 via UEFI bootable USB it installs ok, until it restarts and gets the above winload.efi error. My bios displays "Windows Boot Manager" in the Boot settings, but nothing for the M.2 SSD specifically.  I can boot into my current OS and see my Samsung M.2 Drive perfectly fine and Hard Drive Sentinal displays as a perfectly healthy drive with the Samsung NVME Controller working with speed test that put my old drive to shame...  Is there something I am missing that I need in order to boot off the 960 EVO or is it not possible with this version and the Z77 board?   Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.  G.

The Windows Boot Manager entry in the Boot order IS the correct entry for any PCIe NVMe SSD as the boot/OS drive, or any SATA drive that has Windows installed for UEFI booting, ie, using the EFI boot loader. That is simply the way the Windows installer identifies a UEFI booting Windows installation, and that appears in the boot order.

The Z77 Extreme4 is the first board I used when I began using UEFI booting Windows installations on SATA SSDs. We are dealing with what Windows requires when we choose to use the EFI boot loader. It's the same with any mother board manufacture's products.

Newer ASRock boards that have the Boot Manager feature in the UEFI/BIOS Tools screen, allows you to add a suffix to the Windows Boot Manager entry, so it would appear as, for example, "Windows Boot Manager: 960 EVO".

How did you create the UEFI bootable USB flash drive? As you saw with that error message, it either can't find the winload.efi file, or some problem associated with it.

Were there other drives in the PC when you installed Win 10 on the 960 EVO?

If you installed Win 10 on the 960 EVO with any other drives installed (like your current OS that you mentioned) and powered up in the PC, then that is one thing you may have done wrong. The Windows installer for some reason will put the boot/system partition on another drive instead of the target OS drive. Been doing that since at least Windows 7, and MSoft has yet to change that nonsense. The PC would then have multiple boot/system partitions, and the first one found is the one that is used, which may be the non-UEFI booting installation on your "current OS" drive.

To avoid this, always install Windows with ONLY the target OS drive installed (or connected to power) when installing Windows. If this is ignored, nothing will change.

If the 960 EVO was the only drive in the PC when you installed Windows 10, did you select the entry in the boot order for the USB installation media? Normally you would have two entries for the USB flash drive in the boot order. You must select the one that is, "UEFI: <flash drive name>", otherwise you won't get a UEFI booting Windows installation.

Please answer my questions, and we can move on from there.