M5A99FX PRO R2.0 and [m.2 disks] M.2 drives

skypuppy

Commendable
Jun 24, 2016
18
0
1,510
With this mobo, I'm having a great deal of trouble getting the m.2 to work. The m.2 is the ocz RD400 at 512Gb.
Since the mobo can't boot from that m.2 drive, I'm using debian 9 (stretch) (or at least trying to) to be able to use it until the new x370 mobo gets here.
The m.2 drive is in the pcie black slot furthest from the CPU and the nvidia 960 video card is in the slot closest to the cpu. Are these shared lanes or something?
The system works fine in Debian 8 where the m.2 drive is not even recognized but I get boot-time crashes (after hours and hours of figuring out how to boot from a USB flash drive while the OS resides on the m.2 (all hard drives removed for this testing.))
So, Debian 8 works but no m.2
Debian 9, m.2 is seen during install but crashes on boot.

So I'm wondering if maybe it has to do with which pcie slot the m.2 and nvidia 960 are in. But maybe I'm way off base here.
Any ideas, folks? Sure would like to have this working Windows is not even in the picture, btw.
 
D

Deleted member 217926

Guest
It should work with a SATA controller M2 drive and an adapter but it certainly does not have NVMe support. Only a very few AM3 boards do.
 

skypuppy

Commendable
Jun 24, 2016
18
0
1,510
As I said, when you boot with Linux Debian 9, it is seen by the OS, it loads all the software, partitions are created and destroyed so when you bypass the BIOS, it DOES work. So I'm wondering if it's because Debian 9 is not ready for prime time or if it's some conflict with the pcie bus graphics card, or what.

It just won't boot by itself from BIOS. Using a flash drive gets around that.
 

Stomatopoda

Reputable
Dec 30, 2014
3
0
4,510


I am having a similar issue with the same board. Except I'm trying install Windows 7 and boot from the M.2 SSD (SM951). Do you mind explaining how you were able to boot from the USB and bypass the bios? Is that something I can do with Windows?
 
D

Deleted member 217926

Guest


No. The board doesn't support booting ( any ) Windows from NVMe it lacks the needed UEFI module, he made Linux work. Also you need to slipstream an NVMe driver into a Windows 7 install for it to work even if you had a compatible motherboard. Windows 7 does not natively support NVMe at all.
 

skypuppy

Commendable
Jun 24, 2016
18
0
1,510


 

skypuppy

Commendable
Jun 24, 2016
18
0
1,510
0. There is boot from USB capability in the BIOS.
1. I tinkered with separating the boot and root physical locations so they are in separate physical locations.
2. I used that to boot Debian 9 Linux that has support for M.2 drives, where Debian 8 does not.
3. As the previous poster said, Win7 doesn't have M.2 capability.
4. If you can find an M.2 driver for Win7, you might be able do the same but I just can't see how. Maybe later on if someone releases a native driver.
5. Or update to a newer motherboard, but you'll still need a Win7 driver. Have you tried researching this? Microsoft? Web search? Toshiba?