First of all, THANK YOU for a most excellent guide, and all the hard work you put into doing this.

I'm having a problem with Clover just hanging when I select my boot device. ANY boot device. I will get either the windows or clover logo just frozen.

I'm running a HP z620 workstation with a secure BIOS that I just can't seem to get to flash so I went looking for other methods (like yours!). Any help would be great. What info would be useful in diagnosing this problem?

I wanted to update with MY personal experience....

I didn't use the clover method listed here, but I did use the drivers from clover while implementing the rEFIned Bootloader instead.

I have a Samsung 850 evo with 2 partitions: a small partition for the rEFIned Bootloader, and a storage partition. I have copied the NVME drivers into the appropriate place, and verified they loaded in the UEFI shell. The system now boots to my fresh install of windows 10 on my Samsung SM961 (OEM version of the 960 pro) on my HP Z620 workstation!

Thank you all so much for the help and guidance provided on this forum. Now if only I could figure out why all my write speeds are SOOOO SLOW!

I have. My issues are mostly due to the 128gb drive performance in general. I've read many posts and have the optimal drivers, BIOS, etc.

My SM961 128GB write speeds are slower than your posted benchmarks for the 950 pro, but read speeds are a bit faster. I didn't want to shell out the big $$ till I was sure I could boot to OS.

I've read that the NVME isn't a great option for OS storage (longer boots), what are your thoughts on that? From a full shutdown (no fastboot) I will go from BIOS splash screen to Windows 10 desktop in just under 11 sec. On my SM961 128gb.

Thank you for a great guide, Nyctophilia!

Worked like a charm, but had to set DefaultLoader to blank to get the settings in config.plist to work on the newest version of Clover that I got via cvad's great boot disk utility.

Now my new 256GB Intel 600p nvme/m.2 SSD is working with super speeds(1500 MB/s!!) in W10 on a Gigabyte BIOS mobo from 2010!

-Great fun!

Now I just got inspired to install Mac OS, as well...

Vegard

Thank you so much for this guide. I had tried a different version of clover previously and it did not work. I went from using Tianocore on a precision T5500 with an Intel 1.2TB 750 series drive that got 1400 read and 1000 write to a precision T5600 with the same drive using clover and getting 2500 read and 1500 write (difference between PCIe 2.0 and 3.0)

Edit: I also wanted to note I'm using clover under legacy boot because UEFI clover will not boot, I think it conflicts with the nearly-useless version of UEFI that's on the mobo.

Hello guys,

as promised, here's the tutorial - Booting Samsung SM961 on ASUS P6T SE

Please let us know if it worked for you, so Fernando can then officially create a thread on Win-Raid Forum that running bootable NVMe SSDs on X58 chipset is definitely possible, thanks! :)

All the best in 2017.

-M.

Another brilliant effort! Just because it seems like the obvious question to the guru's.... pros/cons of Clover vs. DUET?

Update: I just got a Samsung 960 EVO 1GB. After all this research, the "darn" Dell Precision 5150 installed Win 10 Enterprise x64 to the new NVMe stick with no need for Clover or DUET. I installed the 2.0.0.1607 driver package and while it's downloading the hundreds of MS patches, AS SSD Benchmark went from ~2,300 (Clover and PM951 512mb) to 4,100+. Yeah, I'd say it was a good purchase.

Afaik, DUET was the first thing the folks at TianoCore did. If I am not mistaken (correct me if I am wrong), Clover team based its Clover bootloader on DUET.

So, I'd definitely recommend using Clover if you plan doing hackintosh stuff, because Clover seems totally optimized for it (there are some many tweaks incorporated in it due to hackintosh).

I'd definitely recommend using DUET for Windows, because it's the "original and purest implementation" of the stable UEFI standard, and it seems to works incredibly well on X58 platform, even in 2017 :)

For other users - you may also want to dig in the thread here to see additional details on how to get NVMe PCI-e SSD running on X58/legacy platforms. Please report back how you proceed, thanks!

@mireque

Thanks for your DUET/Tianocore tutorial. I've read all of your posts related to NVMe boot in this forum. Really great findings, glad that you succeeded with all tweaks and compiling :) Maybe even make a small tutorial on how to compile the newest version including the needed drivers yourself? This might eliminate the last sceptical guesses, and give some opportunity to make own versions, as there might be some "incompatibilities" with different chipsets and mainboard versions, as DUET/Tianocore is a more "raw" approach.

This is why I fully agree with you. If you just have a windows PC, rather use the "cleaner" method with DUET/Tianocore. I didn't do alot research to that yet, but I'm not sure if the hackintosh optimizations actually are applied if you boot Windows via Clover. If I'll find some time, I'll research and maybe modify this thread, to direct users on when to use which method. Even better, maybe @Fernando should just add both guides into his main guide about making BIOSes/UEFIs NVMe bootable, just as alternative methods, because some people might oversee that there are other possibilities, when not being successfull or scared with modding their BIOS/UEFI.

Greetings

@Nyctophilia

Thanks. I think we will have to wait for some other success reports from others before going anywhere forwards. Currently I'm testing the DUET from UDK2015, so far seems stable.

I definitely encourage "legacy" users to try every method described on this forum to get their NVMe SSD booting (either yours method via Clover or the one I have written about).

One cannot lose anything and 2017 is surely going to be the M.2 NVMe SSD year I guess :-)

Hi

I try to install windows with this metod but did not working for me. Maybe i done something wrong i do not know. It boot normally to Clover-EFI bootloader, but then did not start Windows installation. It just freeze.

Then i try guide from @mireque and it worked. I have only one problem with Automating boot process. I create startup.nsh file, but program did not load this file. so i must to manually load UEFI drivers, what is a waste of time.

I create new text file and inside that file put:
load fs0:\EFI\Drivers\NvmExpressDxe-64.efi
map -r
fs0:\EFI\Boot\Bootx64.efi

Then save as startup.nsh an place it to EFI\Boot folder.
But it is not working.
If i manually insert same commands it working!!!

Sorry for bad english.

Best regard

Hi @Mrus ,

thanks for your report. First, I can see a mistake/typo in your startup.nsh script:

fs0:\EFI\Boot\Bootx64.efi -> should be fs1:\EFI\Boot\Bootx64.efi (fs1 is the partition where the Windows 10 UEFI bootloader is located, not fs0).

I can imagine if you'd be using using fs0 here then you'd be essentially "boot-looping" the UEFI Shell from the DUET USB stick and the real Windows 10 bootloader will never get executed.

If this is not the case (you have a typo here), does startup.nsh ever execute? Can you please post some screenshots what the UEFI Shell is saying when trying to execute the startup.nsh script?