Hello Fernando,

I hope you can help me with this one:

I have a PX-256M6eA-BK PCI-E SSD drive,
and it is incompatible with my mainboard.

The mainboard is the famous
ASROCK X58 EXTREME
which has always this kind of problems....

I have tested many bios versions with no luck. I experiment a reboot loop just after the BIOS screen but before windows loading. I can enter the BIOS, modify and save, and can also see the Plextor card as IDE disk device.

Testing the SSD card in another Pc (X79 mainboard) was successful. I see that at the boot process, a splash screen with the Plextor logo appears briefly. Seems to me that the problem is in that moment - I can't see the logo with the X58 mainboard, and computer reboots and reboots.

I tried also to update the card; I have firmware version 1.00, but the Plextool application says it cannot find a firmware upgrade....

Can you help me?

I was thinking about modding the X58 bios by removing some unused modules (raid, firewire) which occupy a fixed load location. Maybe some of them is interfering with the Plextor?

I dont' know if simply deleting those modules with MMTOOL and flashing the modded bios could harm the mainboard.

I'm also waiting for Plextor to respond my support form :(

Zitat von Falco75 im Beitrag #45

---

I tried also to update the card; I have firmware version 1.00, but the Plextool application says it cannot find a firmware upgrade....

---

Hello and thanks,

I searched for this but cannot find it on the Plextor website.

However,
when I start the update process,
it finds all the disk devices attached, including Plextor SSD PCIe, but it says "device not matched".

http://falco75.altervista.org/29072016752.jpg

Your card is slightly different to my "PLEXTOR_PX-AG256M6e" but the firmware file should be the same and can be found here. search by category and select Firmware_ISO.
From Plextor: NAND Flash M6e-BK uses TOSHIBA 19nm Toggle MLC / M6eA-BK uses TOSHIBA A19nm Toggle MLC.
I think you have to wait a reply from Plextor support.

Yes yes I did it.

It only comes out with a couple of utilities and manuals.

I have also found today the ISO you sent me from touslesdrivers, the french site with a lot of this stuff, searching for something, but nothing else came out.

I'm waiting for Plextor response.

What do you think about cutting away pieces of the original MB BIOS?

I think that this issue has something related to that... @Fernando

PS: I just talk with plextor live chat,
and they indicated me to download the firmware and update it.

Too bad it's the same file I already have :/

Zitat von Falco75 im Beitrag #49

---

What do you think about cutting away pieces of the original MB BIOS?

I think that this issue has something related to that... @Fernando

---

I'm trying with another board to do the update,
this time a brand-new B150 board.
Evertything works but the update is still not working..

I called again Plextor and found out a much smarter technician.
Will send a mail to him, and the issue will be sent to the higher level tech support to see if they can find another "internal" firmware for me.
Still nothing from Asrock.

Some news:

I managed to make the PC start with a strange trick.
If I enter BIOS and make "discard and exit", the computer boots also with the PCIe SSD connected, and this way I'm out of the reboot loop.
Definitely there is a bug with the bios or the SSD firmware.

I have now another problem:
the card is detected as a boot device and also the speed is ok (over 700 Mb/s read),
but installing Win8.1 gives you a good black screen at the first reboot after installation.
Definitely there is some BIOS >< UEFI incompatibility too.

If I leave the SSD formatted but without any SO installed, it comes up with the normal "MBR not present" or "BOOTLDR missing", as normal. But with a SO installed it locks up.
I'm trying to bypass also this problem using procedures like this,
http://mrlithium.blogspot.it/2015/12/how...egacy-bios.html
but since now with no luck since I have seroius problems making the USB drive with Tianocore correctly working.

If anybody can help, thanks in advance.

@Fernando still waiting for your opinion on this.

Anybody running X58 may want to try what I did to make SM961 boot on X58 (ASUS P6T SE) - see my blog post here https://audiocricket.com/2016/12/31/boot...t-se-mainboard/

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! :)

Great work.

I have tried for some time to refine such a procedure, with no luck,

then I solved installing windows on a normal hard disk, and cloning the windows data partition on the PCIe SSD, leaving the 100Mb boot partition on the hard disk.

Setting hard disk as boot device, it worked like a charm without much effort ;)

Zitat von mireque im Beitrag #54

---

Anybody running X58 may want to try what I did to make SM961 boot on X58 (ASUS P6T SE) - see my blog post here https://audiocricket.com/2016/12/31/boot...t-se-mainboard/
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! :)

---

That was exactly the method i used.

-Installing Windows (seven, in my case, my brother preferred to use the older one) on the Hard Drive
-Cloning the hard drive on the PCIe SSD (all the content, both Boot and SO partitions)
-deleted the 100mb partition on the SSD and deleted the SO partition on the hard drive (to create a regular large partition later, leaving the 100Mb Boot unouched)
-selected Hard disk as boot device
-enjoy

I don't remember having used other strange tricks to make it work. I remembered that many times, when installing Windows on a dual-disk computer with SSD and Hard disk, often windows would install the boot partition on a disk and the data partition on another in a very dumb way, so I used this famous bug as an advantage :D

Hi Fernando,

thanks for your reply. I probably understand what you've asked. I don't have any other platform than X58 to try this on, hence it's aimed at what worked 100% for me. Couple of remarks though (some of it is included in the Prerequisites section):


- The boot sector is on the NVMe SSD (Windows installer does this), but DUET bootable USB stick via DUET accesses the FAT hidden system partition on the NVMe SSD where Windows 10 is installed via provided UEFI driver (NvmExpress-*.efi) and then just executes (= boots) the Windows 10 bootloader (that is \EFI\Boot\Bootx64.EFI image on the hidden Windows partition)

- You need to have a free PCI-e slot for the M.2 to PCI-e adapter ;)

- I have chosen USB 3.0 stick for Windows 10 installation mostly due to performance reasons and for differentiation of system block devices, you can of course also use USB 2.0 sticks to put Windows 10 install ISO on, but then it will be a little bit messed up in the UEFI Shell, and I didn't want to bother users with guessing game (unless the user is more experienced and wants to play with UEFI Shell) - so using USB 3.0 stick was the most straightforward way for me

- You can use Windows 8.1 Pro too (I have been running it on the same setup before switching to Windows 10)

- It is possible to use the other SATA disk as a boot device, BUT ...

- ... because I have chosen Windows 10, I currently don't recommend using any other disk other than the NVMe in the system (especially for bootloaders, maybe as data disks should be fine), because in my experience and that really happened, Windows 10 had simply messed up bootsectors of my SATA drive (and this has been widely documented on the Internet that Windows 10 really act strange sometimes) and the bootloader on the SATA drive just went missing - I couldn't boot my NVMe from the SATA disk partition, therefore using USB sticks for bootloading seems like a better way - maybe Windows 8.1 Pro should be OK bootloaded from other SATA drive, but I definitely not recommend this for Windows 10 systems for now ..

- Also, using other SATA disks may potentionally affect whole system performance, because Windows (even running from NVMe) is accessing those SATA disks - from my experience, I could clearly see difference in boot times when system was temporarily connected with my old SATA OCZ Vertex 2 drives in AHCI mode (as suggested in my tutorial)

- Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 installers do have native NVMe drivers present - theoretically, if the NVMe PCI-e drive correctly implements the basic NVMe standard, it should be usable (of course you can miss some of the performance by not using drivers from the manufacturers)

- I confirm that the Samsung NVMe 2.0 driver works correctly with SM961 under Windows 8.1 Pro / Windows 10 Pro (as others on the Internet rumoured that it doesn't work - IT WORKS)


I can only recommend other users of LEGACY platforms to try this tutorial and report back. It will be very useful for us to know what works. I personally plan on trying out other NVMe's like Intel 600p, OCZ RD400 and maybe some Samsung EVO 960... My tutorial is not meant as the defacto standard for booting NVMe's on legacy systems :), but mostly as a hint for those who want to try it out. I can see users succeed with booting from the other SATA drives, using USB 2.0 sticks as Windows install media, etc - this is only the beginning.

Guys, please do share if you tried it, X58 is still strong enough, even in 2017 ;)