SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus NVME M.2 SSD with PCIE card NOT WORKING - Won't INITIALIZE Windows 10 - - Orico expansion Card LENOVO M900

[Paspallum]

Raker... no it just would not work
I got a swap on the Samsung drive for another brand new one, just in case the original was faulty... still wouldn’t work. Recently I tried again with a star tech adaptor and a seagate barracuda Q5 nmve drive... worked perfectly

 

[DellPrecisionT5810]

Seems like I got the same problem. My setup: Dell Precision T5810+Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500 GB+Orico PSM2 NVMe PCIe card.

In Disk Manager, the drive first appeared as uninit'ed. When init'ing, I got an error "A device which does not exist was specified – Disk error". Having installed SSD driver afresh, the status changed as init'ed, which is good. But unfortunately I was distracted and rebooted the machine to see whether I can see it in BIOS (which I didn't). What's worse, now Disk Manager is hanging on "Connecting the virtual disk service" without showing anything!

Unintall or repair the NVMe driver now gives me error as well.

The disk shows in Device Manager just correctly always.

I'm probably going to reinstall Win 10 (on the working SATA SSD drive). So at least I can see, when the Samsung driver is installed, the NVMe at least works properly without being a bootable drive.

I have been trying to install Win 10 afresh on this NVMe SSD to get better performance but I'm having hard time.

Any help would be hugely appreciated.

 

[Shou Miko]

Seems like I got the same problem. My setup: Dell Precision T5810+Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500 GB+Orico PSM2 NVMe PCIe card.

In Disk Manager, the drive first appeared as uninit'ed. When init'ing, I got an error "A device which does not exist was specified – Disk error". Having installed SSD driver afresh, the status changed as init'ed, which is good. But unfortunately I was distracted and rebooted the machine to see whether I can see it in BIOS (which I didn't). What's worse, now Disk Manager is hanging on "Connecting the virtual disk service" without showing anything!

Unintall or repair the NVMe driver now gives me error as well.

The disk shows in Device Manager just correctly always.

I'm probably going to reinstall Win 10 (on the working SATA SSD drive). So at least I can see, when the Samsung driver is installed, the NVMe at least works properly without being a bootable drive.

I have been trying to install Win 10 afresh on this NVMe SSD to get better performance but I'm having hard time.

Any help would be hugely appreciated.

What version number of Windows 10? 1809, 1903, 1909, 2004, 20H2, 21H1?

Because with the older versions I had to load in the NVME driver before Windows 10 would find or even install on my NVME SSD's back in the day plus it had to be done in FAT32 but these days are over.

I am 95% sure that it's not the Orico PSM2 NVME PCIe card, and have you updated the bios on your Dell Precision T5810 and have UEFI enabled in bios?

 

[DellPrecisionT5810]

Thanks for your response. That’s exactly what happened.

Yes, the first thing I did was to upgrade bios to the latest version. That’s what I learned online before buying this T5810 workstation.

As I said, now I reinstalled windows 10 on my SATA SSD drive. This time when opening Disk Manager, the drives all showed up without hanging on connecting to virtual drive service but the nvme ssd remained uninit’ed. After installing the Samsung driver, I could successfully init it, create new partition, format, and use as normal. So obviously both of the nvme ssd and the Orico card are not faulty.

Then I disconnected the SATA ssd drive, as suggested by many posts, trying to reinstall on this nvme drive. I tried all the combinations of uaefi/legacy boot and SATA setting to IDE, ACHI, RAID, or disabled, with secured boot OFF. When booting from the legacy mode, the nvme drive showed up in the booting device list, but when I went on with the installation, there was one drive available but with 0MB capacity. It disappeared after pressing‘Refresh’. Then of course I was unable to continue.

I was not sure about my windows 10 installation media version but I just downloaded it from Microsoft website days ago so presume it’s the latest version. (I can check this by reconnecting the SATA SSD and booting from it)

Based on all these, it’s fairly clear to me the Orico card is not the culprit. Since even in the fresh win 10, a driver is needed to use the nvme drive, I believe I must have a driver of it that can be used when installation win 10. (At the point of specifying destination drive when no drive was shown, I did try to load driver from another USB containing the Samsung driver(an .EXE executive file format) but it was not recognised as a valid driver. I all tried to decompress the .EXE file into individual files but this didn’t help either)

I guess I will have to ask Samsung for a driver of it that is in the traditional format (my loose language) with extension of SYS, DLL, maybe along with an .INF file so it can be recognised and loaded when installing (not after installation) of win 10?

 

[Shou Miko]

@DellPrecisionT5810 Samsung got their Data Migration tool, since you got a clean install of Windows 10 (Hopefully 20H2 or what it's called can be check by clicking on start and typing winver and hit enter).

You also find the driving after installing Samsung#s NVME driver and you say you can use it as normal give the Data Migration tool a try, I used it before it's easy and can do SATA to NVME no problems, the other way it can't tried it and it failed

Link: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/
DDL: Data Migration Software

 

[DellPrecisionT5810]

Will give it a try this evening. I think this means cloning the existing win10 installation to nvme. This is not ideal but if it works (I hope) it’s good enough.

 

[Shou Miko]

Will give it a try this evening. I think this means cloning the existing win10 installation to nvme. This is not ideal but if it works (I hope) it’s good enough.

You ain't moving it from one system to another so in my experience you will be totally fine plus you got all your drivers installed.

I have even activated secure boot after installing Windows 10 and 11 without secure boot enabled.

I am excited to hear if it wanna boot of the SSD

 

[DellPrecisionT5810]

Interesting things are happening - not entirely worked out but I think, and hope, I'm closer.

For some strange reason, the SATA SSD wouldn't restart, so I had to reinstall Win 10 again. Then install Samsung NVMe driver as previously, create partition and volume, etc. Use the Migration tool to clone the whole system to the NVMe drive. It's cool and quick.

Rebooting, now the NVMe drive appears in BIOS as a UEFI boot device! What's bad though was Win 10 stalled at the startup wallpaper interface. I removed the SATA drive and tried many settings the problem persists.... I could not even boot from the original SATA drive -- the same problem.

Yet another reinstallation and then NVMe driver, the system became obviously problematic, it's slow and did not respond when pressing Disk Manager. I unplugged the NVMe, it returned to normal. Replugged in NVMe, not good again.

Now I'm going to try reinstalling Win 10 on SATA without NVMe plugged in, then plug it in, install NVMe driver, migrate, unplug SATA and then see what happens.

Very strange!

By the way, the version of win 10 is 21H1.

This is after data migration what appears on the booting drive list which looks very promising.

Since now the nvme drive is recognised before loading win 10, I thought it can be seen as a proper drive for installation. To my surprise and unfortunately the same 0MB drive issue (and disappearing after refreshing) persists.

 

[Shou Miko]

If you are installing Windows 10 of a bootable USB flash drive you could add the drivers for the NVME SSD on the drive too and try to "Load driver" and what does "Windows can't be installed on this drive. (Show details)" show?

 

[DellPrecisionT5810]

Thanks for following! Yes, I thought of this, as I mentioned earlier, the driver available is an executive file that can run in win 10 but not recognisable at this stage by clicking load driver and browse to the folder (I even uncompressed it into individual files, the same. That’s why I said I may have to ask Samsung for a driver that can be used here.) There might be people who know how to properly extract the ‘core’ or ‘raw’ driver from the .EXE file that can be loaded.

To answer your question specifically, I remember it says not enough space etc nothing very useful. And when loading the driver from another USB drive, it says no driver found in the folder (where the .EXE driver sits).

Now the problem is, with a clone of the system on the nvme drive, the machine does not work properly. Having disabled the nvme in bios, I managed to start into windows 10 but obviously it’s not behaving. Left clicking the windows button does not give me a menu. However I can have device manager by right clicking it. Stranger still, the nvme drive appears now differently as a SCSI drive!

I will now try to figure out the driver file in the Samsung .EXE driver.

At this moment, I could even not have the nvme plugged and boot from the original working SATA SSD drive. This is ridiculous.

By extracting the Samsung NVMe driver (.exe) here, I could not find any file that looks like a driver - no .mis, .sys, .dll, .inf extensions. only "0", "u1", "u1", ... "u40". I tried to extract all of these files again with 7-Zip. For those prompted as not an archive, I manually added extension ".dll" (then ".sys"). But still cannot find any driver when pressing "Load driver".

This exhausted what I can think of in extracting from Samsung_NVM_Express_Driver_3.3.exe.

Mission failed.

Then it came to a turn --

I found a cool website where I found the Samsung driver (.sys, .inf, etc.) that I was looking for. This can be loaded! Then I deleted all the existing partitions and recreate new ones. The installation went as normal BUT after restarting (to complete installation), it stalled when "Getting devices ready 16%" or so. Long press the switch to turn off and then restart, I got an error "The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. ..."

Turn Secure boot off and have another go, the same. The process froze at "Getting devices ready 19%".

It's ridiculous Samsung does not provide this form of NVMe driver on its website!

The good thing is at least I think (I think) I can erase the content of the NVMe drive so the system on the SATA SSD drive should work properly (but I still need to test and see!).

Yes, this works. Booting from the USB Win 10 installation media, loading the NVMe driver mentioned above, delete all of its partitions, then quit installation and restart from the SATA SSD. It works in general. What's strange is Disk Management tool is still hanging. And the NVMe appears in Device Manager as an "SCSI Device", and became non-responsive when double-clicking it.

 

[Shou Miko]

Thanks for following! Yes, I thought of this, as I mentioned earlier, the driver available is an executive file that can run in win 10 but not recognisable at this stage by clicking load driver and browse to the folder (I even uncompressed it into individual files, the same. That’s why I said I may have to ask Samsung for a driver that can be used here.) There might be people who know how to properly extract the ‘core’ or ‘raw’ driver from the .EXE file that can be loaded.

To answer your question specifically, I remember it says not enough space etc nothing very useful. And when loading the driver from another USB drive, it says no driver found in the folder (where the .EXE driver sits).

Now the problem is, with a clone of the system on the nvme drive, the machine does not work properly. Having disabled the nvme in bios, I managed to start into windows 10 but obviously it’s not behaving. Left clicking the windows button does not give me a menu. However I can have device manager by right clicking it. Stranger still, the nvme drive appears now differently as a SCSI drive!View attachment 216363

I will now try to figure out the driver file in the Samsung .EXE driver.

At this moment, I could even not have the nvme plugged and boot from the original working SATA SSD drive. This is ridiculous.

By extracting the Samsung NVMe driver (.exe) here, I could not find any file that looks like a driver - no .mis, .sys, .dll, .inf extensions. only "0", "u1", "u1", ... "u40". I tried to extract all of these files again with 7-Zip. For those prompted as not an archive, I manually added extension ".dll" (then ".sys"). But still cannot find any driver when pressing "Load driver".

This exhausted what I can think of in extracting from Samsung_NVM_Express_Driver_3.3.exe.

Mission failed.

Then it came to a turn --

I found a cool website where I found the Samsung driver (.sys, .inf, etc.) that I was looking for. This can be loaded! Then I deleted all the existing partitions and recreate new ones. The installation went as normal BUT after restarting (to complete installation), it stalled when "Getting devices ready 16%" or so. Long press the switch to turn off and then restart, I got an error "The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. ..."

Turn Secure boot off and have another go, the same. The process froze at "Getting devices ready 19%".

It's ridiculous Samsung does not provide this form of NVMe driver on its website!
View attachment 216399View attachment 216400

The good thing is at least I think (I think) I can erase the content of the NVMe drive so the system on the SATA SSD drive should work properly (but I still need to test and see!).

If you can get away with not deleting the partition like reinstalling it over the exsiting data should be fine.

Normal Samsung Migration tool optimize for NVME storage.

Even my own Samsung 970 EVO Plus is called the same as yours, I am on Windows 11.

(Sorry for the small screenshot I am running 4K here).

 

[DellPrecisionT5810]

Ok so the name is not an issue. That's a good news. Thanks.

More tests and a little bit of progress. Numerous new installations. Followed some advice of setting BIOS to default, taking out RAM banks, unplugging all unnecessary USBs, etc. The last one worked -- "Getting devices ready" now finished quickly but when next step "Getting ready ..." I got a black screen with only a mouse responding... Frozen again.

Anyway, I'm moving forward. But still not there yet.

Would like to install Win 11, but as far as I know my CPU is not supported -- E5-1650 V3 3.5GHz Xeon.

 

[Shou Miko]

Ok so the name is not an issue. That's a good news. Thanks.

More tests and a little bit of progress. Numerous new installations. Followed some advice of setting BIOS to default, taking out RAM banks, unplugged all unnecessary USBs, etc. The last one worked -- "Getting devices ready" now finished quickly but when "Getting ready ..." I got a black screen with only a mouse responding... Frozen again.

Anyway, I'm moving forward. But still not there yet.

Would like to install Win 11, but as far as I know my CPU is not supported -- E5-1650 V3 3.5GHz Xeon.

The newest Windows 11 installation doesn't check for CPU, I got a Dell Latitude E7470 with a Intel Core i5-6300U which Dell actually updated earlier this year to have TPM 2.0, I installed Windows 11 with TPM 2.0 activated but not secure boot and didn't face any errors at all and it runs like a charm.

I have been thinking about ditching my whole computer and go to laptop but I know myself I cannot live with a laptop only sadly I am a hardware addict

 

[DellPrecisionT5810]

I only very recently thought about win 11 and never knew TPM before hearing from you. Not sure if t5810 could ever install. This model was first released in 2014, and the one I have was manufactured in July 2016.

I’m not content with laptop either.

 

[Shou Miko]

I only very recently thought about win 11 and never knew TPM before hearing from you. Not sure if t5810 could ever install. This model was first released in 2014, and the one I have was manufactured in July 2016.

I’m not content with laptop either.

According to Dell's own page your system should have been shipped with TPM 1.2 and should be upgradeable to TPM 2.0 but it requires a bios update.

Link: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/...-that-can-upgrade-from-tpm-version-1-2-to-2-0

So go to Dell's support page and find the newest bios and then after updating the bios run this Dell TPM 2.0 Firmware Update Utility: https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-uk/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=rf87d

On my own Dell laptop I used Dell's Windows tool to update so I didn't do all this manually.

 

[DellPrecisionT5810]

If I can upgrade to Win 11 definitely I would like to, and don't need to struggle with the issues with Win 10.

I did upgrade to the latest BIOD as the first thing already.

Yes, I can find the TPM 1.2 and 2.0 stuff on Dell's website for T5810. But I'm unable to run both 1.2 and 2.0. I got this error --

By the way, how can I find out what's the current TPM version? Thanks for your help.

 

[Shou Miko]

If I can upgrade to Win 11 definitely I would like to, and don't need to struggle with the issues with Win 10.

I did upgrade to the latest BIOD as the first thing already.

Yes, I can find the TPM 1.2 and 2.0 stuff on Dell's website for T5810. But I'm unable to run both 1.2 and 2.0. I got this error --
View attachment 216733
By the way, how can I find out what's the current TPM version? Thanks for your help.

This should be easy: https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-check-tpm-version-windows-11/

 

[DellPrecisionT5810]

Thank you. But bad luck -- tried with PowerShell/get-tpm but got this:

But why??? Is it supposed to have either TPM 1.2 or 2.0 installed? Why TpmPresent=false?

Oh it's disabled in BIOS. After turning it on, it becomes:

Following the instruction of this page, clearing the ownership of TPM, run the Dell TPM 2.0 upgrade utility, I think I'm now running on TPM 2.0 and Win 11 ready?

Wohoo!

This is the only success story of me on this T5810 these recent few days. Thank you for your help along the way @puma99dk.

Since the BIOS had another upgrade (to TPM2.0), I had yet another try of reinstalling Win 10 on the Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe 500GB drive. This was the the farthest I went, but still I got a frozen machine, spinning dots stopped and keyboard NumLock not responding. I think it's time to give up and accept the lower speed of SATA SSD as the system drive?

 

[Arakis]

Thank you. But bad luck -- tried with PowerShell/get-tpm but got this:
View attachment 216863



But why??? Is it supposed to have either TPM 1.2 or 2.0 installed? Why TpmPresent=false?

Oh it's disabled in BIOS. After turning it on, it becomes:
View attachment 216870


Following the instruction of this page, clearing the ownership of TPM, run the Dell TPM 2.0 upgrade utility, I think I'm now running on TPM 2.0 and Win 11 ready?
View attachment 216874

Wohoo!

This is the only success story of me on this T5810 these recent few days. Thank you for your help along the way @puma99dk.

Since the BIOS had another upgrade (to TPM2.0), I had yet another try of reinstalling Win 10 on the Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe 500GB drive. This was the the farthest I went, but still I got a frozen machine, spinning dots stopped and keyboard NumLock not responding. I think it's time to give up and accept the lower speed of SATA SSD as the system drive?

Hi!

I'm going through the exact same things you experienced here. The same drive (970 plus 500gb) same machine and same symptoms. Actually your description of spinning dots, frozen machine is perfect, I would add just a unnumbered boots to the list.

Have you found a solution? I'm almost giving up

Andre

 

[DellPrecisionT5810]

No, unfortunately. I thought I spent too much time on it. I returned the SSD and adapter but didn’t have the luxury to try other brands of both without unreasonable cost and hassle. So I’m now using my SATA ssd at the moment. I might give it another go when the time comes. I don’t use this machine much.
I also didn’t want to use the SSD solution, I don’t remember its name, with a USB stick on the motherboard, which is ugly to me.
I believe there are workable products that work with this machine. It’s a fantastic workstation.
I wish you all good luck. Let me know if you got a success story.

 

[Arakis]

No, unfortunately. I thought I spent too much time on it. I returned the SSD and adapter but didn’t have the luxury to try other brands of both without unreasonable cost and hassle. So I’m now using my SATA ssd at the moment. I might give it another go when the time comes. I don’t use this machine much.
I also didn’t want to use the SSD solution, I don’t remember its name, with a USB stick on the motherboard, which is ugly to me.
I believe there are workable products that work with this machine. It’s a fantastic workstation.
I wish you all good luck. Let me know if you got a success story.

Oh ok. Thanks for the reply. I'm going for the Sata Ssd too. I'm not risk buying another brand and end up the same. I'll play safe.

Thanks

Andre