@ Dieter - one of the participants barisahmet described how he installed windows 10 on his new SM951 (after he got it to boot). he installed win 8 first then upgraded to win 10. that is not necessary anymore, you can use a win 7 or 8 license key to do a clean install of win 10.

Yes that is correct, I should have mentioned it when I posted it (although I did say its not necessary anymore) . However I would like to point out that everybody can get the Win 10 -10565 iso if they want to.

I just read a post in another forum, that a member has succeeded in booting from 950 Pro in an old s775 system (Maximus II Formula, P45 chipset)

You can find the relevant post >here<.

I will ask for further info and maybe i order one for me to use in my AMD system. Hopefully, i succeed too in using it as boot drive.

The weird thing is that he did not need to format as GPT ( at least this is the info from the screenshots ).

Well, i also thought of that, but last screenshot in his post shows that it is the only drive connected. There is a usb flash drive connected, but the disk management info does not show any indication that it stores boot data :

@Fernando
I did not succeed (yet) to get a SM951 AHCI bootable on a P8Z77 PC.
Currently I have a 840 PRO 256 GB W10 bootable media.
I want to get now a SM951 512 GB M.2 SSD AHCI device the boot media (plugged in an add-in PCIe Gen3.0 card).
i have backupped the current ssd system image (.tib and .ami files) for pratical reasons.
I have restored the image on the SM951 device, but whatever the tool used for restore the SM951 is not recognized as a bootable device.
I thought the P8Z77 BIOS was natively compatible with SM951 ..
so, I assume a module is missing somewhere in the ASUS BIOS.
I want to insert the missing UEFI module (=*.ffs file).
Do you have the appropriate .ffs file somewhere compatible with P8Z77 main BIOS ?
By the way a test done on saberX99 get the same result: SM951 not bootable. Is the same .ffs file missing or do we need another .ffs file specific to aptio 5 x99 BIOS ?

@Fernando,
Thanks for your help.
I do not succeed to boot.

Here is the screen of the modded BIOS that I 'flashbacked' it without any problem:



Here is the screen of the partitions:


Do you see any reason why SM951 (E: in my case) is not detected as a bootable media, nor listed in the BIOS storage list ?

Is it because P8Z77 is not full UEFI compliant because when CSM is 'disabled' an invite from BIOS to set CSM 'enable' occurs ?

Thanks Fernando,
Reason 1): not, CSMCORE module was situated at volume 2.
Reason 2): may be ASROCK and ASUS don't use the same version of 'Samsung_M2_DXE' in their "Aptio 4" BIOS
Reason 3): i have to do some tests

@Fernando
After a restore using GPT format on SM951 i get this and always a non bootable media:

So, is the ASROCK added DXE module not compatible with ASUS BIOS ?

The z97 module did not work on my asus z87 motherboard. I had to use the module from the x79 bios posted earlier in this thread.

Worth a shot.

@Fernando,
I have done 2 tests about SM951 AHCI bootability on SaberX99, using the just released new BIOS v2001.

Test 1: Cloning
I have tried to clone the W10 x64 i750 system on the SM951 AHCI.
Cloning does not work (using ATIH 2016) because process does not complete normally:
The cloning process starts well, and proposes well a reboot to be done, but after reboot the system waits for about 1 minute the target SSD be "ready" and reply 'waiting for some peripherals to be ready'.
That means that even on this x99 PC the SM951 AHCI is not recognized as potential bootable.

Test 2: Restore via AOEMI WinPE boot media, with option Universal Restore (when source storage hardware and target storage hardware are different (i750 NVMe 400 GB -> SM951 AHCI 512 GB)
The Restore was OK as reported:


However, trying to Reboot on SM951 device which is a 'clone' of the source goes to a Windows screen (blue) telling clearly "this device is not bootable".

So, the 2 tests confirm a missing piece of software module in the ASUS bios !!

On the Aptio 5 ASUS saber BIOS i don't see any CSMCORE item to insert the "Samsung DXE module".
I ignore what module(s) to add on this specific BIOS to support a SM951 AHCI bootable.

i have asked to ASUS but don't hope have a 'smart' reply except that they do not support BIOS modding..
Any idea from ASUS x99 users are wellcome !