Asus Z170 Pro Gaming ITX board won't recognise M.2 drive

[danirich]

Hi, all, i just pulled my m.2 drive and shiny new motherboard out of their packets, turned it on and... Nothing! I have a couple of pictures here for you guys to see:


The ssd is a Samsung SM951 256GB AHCI SSD, and the motherboard is: Asus PRO GAMING Z170I Mini ITX... Any ideas on what i could've done wrong?

 

[dfk]

try BIOS update maybe.

 

[danirich]

Nope, still nothing :/ Windows installation will recognise the drive but windows 7 hangs at unpacking 100%.... Windows 10 installs just fine but i don't have a key for that!

 

[dfk]

well im stumped as i thought z170 chipset would have better out of the box support for newer SSDs. curious that Win 10 works though, maybe it's an OS driver issue? So your BIOS did finally detected it?

 

[phorce1]

I know this is old but I am installing a full ATX Z170 Pro Gaming for a customer right now and he asked about the M.2 port.

On the specs for the Z170 Pro Gaming ATX board it states that if the M.2 slot has a SATA device plugged in then the regular onboard SATA-1 connector is disabled.

It doesn't say that on the Mini ITX version but it may be the case. Try connecting your other drives to ports 2 and 3 and leave port 1 unused.

 

[danirich]

Hey guys, long story short, the bios STILL doesn't recognise that the m.2 drive is connected, however, windows 10 is installed on it and it boots perfectly well, no other sata connections are disabled either, i currently have a 4tb hdd and a 256gb ssd attached to sata and 0 issues so far, so i'm still stumped as to the bios but screw it, it works!

 

[phorce1]

If the bios doesn't recognize that it is connected, how is it selected as the primary boot device?

I'd be worried that I would forget it is "broken" and run some sort of hard drive speed test that accesses the drives at the hardware level rather than through the Windows API and that would cause an error by trying to use a single SATA channel to write to two different devices at the same time.

Personally, I'd move whatever is plugged into SATA-1 over to another port and find out if he bios could suddenly "see" the M.2 device and if Windows would still boot from it.

 

[AJBOJACK]

Nope, still nothing :/ Windows installation will recognise the drive but windows 7 hangs at unpacking 100%.... Windows 10 installs just fine but i don't have a key for that!

I have the same motherboard with a Samsung 951 SSD PCIe attached to the m.2 slot under the motherboard. I am trying to install windows 7 as my main OS on this SSD but I can't seem to see it in the bios or even during the windows install.

I boot from a usb get to the language part select Start Now and then I am presented with a screen stating it cannot find any drivers.

Could you explain what you did to get this working??

 

[Malcky]

Will it not have something to do with Windows 10 has an NVME driver within its installation and is able to complete the install, whereas windows 7 does not have that driver.

 

[AJBOJACK]

Will it not have something to do with Windows 10 has an NVME driver within its installation and is able to complete the install, whereas windows 7 does not have that driver.

Ive connected various usb with the drivers on there at the "Select the driver to be installed" screen but nothing appears accept Boot(X) when you click browse. Any ideas how i can get this to detect the devices?

 

[Malcky]

Don't you have to click on refresh after you've plugged in a usb drive when it prompts you to "select the driver to be installed"

Also I don't even think windows 7 recognises usb 3.0 devices at that part of the installation, so make sure your using a usb 2 flash drive in one of the usb 2 sockets.

 

[AJBOJACK]

what im going to do is just make my own iso with the driver embedded, such as sata, NVMe, usb3... similar to what this guy did in this post - http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2817439/install-windows-x64-sm951-drive.html
ive just made a win 10 bootable usb and its loaded up no problem detected both my drives :S why did they make this so difficult for windows 7...its just crazy

 

[Malcky]

I personally don't know how to embed additional drivers into an iso but that would be ideal.....might just have to see how such a thing is done and see if its do-able for me.

Lets know how you get on though.

 

[AJBOJACK]

I tried it last night and it failed. Just took me to a black screen with error code - 0xc000000e

In the end, i just installed windows 10 which booted up and saw both my drives without a problem.

The software I used to embed the driver and patch update into the iso was NTLite.

 

[Malcky]

Oh well if it failed then I probably won't bother with windows 7, will just have to bite the bullet and buy a retail version of windows 10.

 

[danirich]

"Oh well if it failed then I probably won't bother with windows 7, will just have to bite the bullet and buy a retail version of windows 10."

Hi, Malcky. I first tried installing Windows 7 but it stuck on the first stage of the install process, this is bevause (as i am led to believe) Skylake does not support Windows 7 install via USB natively, you have to modify the installation USB before it works properly! Either way, im good with Windows 10!