Intel P3600 1.2tb nvme ssd issue

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
1

Hi Guys. I am new to NVME ssds so please bare with me.
I’m trying to use an intel p3600 NVME ssd as my primary boot ssd but I am having some rather odd issues with trying to get it to work as a primary boot drive.

PC specs:
e5-2696 xeon
asrock extreme4 x99
*This asrock motherboard supports xeon CPUs and has support for bootable nvme devices
bios version: 3.60
32gb samsung ecc memory
Ableconn PEXU2-132 2.5-inch U.2 (SFF-8639) SSD PCIe 3.0 x4 adapter

Situation:
I tried using the nvme ssd as my primary boot ssd for windows 8.1. Bios found the intel drive in the advanced nvme config folder and I was able to install win 8.1. I used a USB stick during installation for the specific intel nvme drivers and it installed smoothly. I did notice that every few days my PC would fail to completely boot and it would boot into system restore mode.

I decided to install win10 because I figured it would work better with my nvme ssd and not be as unstable. I started a win10 clean install and it found the ssd and the partitions from 8.1. I decided to delete the partitions in the win10 installer so I could create a new partition and start from scratch. Once I deleted the win8.1 partitions in the installation manager, windows 10 refused to install to the newly created partition, even though I pointed to the correct intel nvme drivers on a usb flash drive. It gave me the error “windows cant write to this disk, computer’s hardware may not support booting to this disk.” There was no specific error code listed as the problem.
After I cancelled the installation, I tried rebooting the pc and the windows installer did indeed wipe all the partitions from the drive, which it usually doesnt do if it can’t proceed with an install. I then noticed that the intel drive was no longer listed as a boot option on bootup sequence, as it was previously. The drive was still being picked up in the advanced nvme config folder in bios, but it would not show up on bootup sequence. I tried installing ubuntu. ubuntu installer finds the drive, writes to the drive and the drive doesnt boot on startup.

The only logical conclusion I can come to is that I deleted the boot partition table on the hard drive. Is there anyway to rebuild the drive so it can be bootable again?

Is there something I missed? Am I completely wrong? If anyone has any input, that would be fantastic. Thanks a ton guys!

2

I’ve run into this before. I ended up setting up windows in another system, then bringing the ssd over and that worked fine. That was on an Asus P9 motherboard.

Did you boot the win10 installer in uefi mode? it may be that the x99 supports booting from a parition that’s already there.

Eventually I just used grub to dual boot and that was fine.

3

Thanks for the info! I did not know there was a win10 UEFI specific installer. I have a bootable win10 usb installer, but I don’t think it was the UEFI one. I’ll give it a try and report back. Thanks!

4

If you do the boot menu you should see two entries if you have csm enabled. One uefi on regular.

If you disable csm you only get uefi but on those boards disabling csm may not be an option.

1 Like
5

Thanks! I didn’t realize that there were UEFI specific boot options. I enabled CSM mode and just used the UEFI boot options. I ended up setting CSM identical to the config from thessdreview of the P3700 ssd:

I was able to get Win8.1/win10 to install, which is pretty fantastic. I had to change the way the nvme SSD was formatted. Win8.1/10 want a GPT partition table. My NVME ssd had a MBR partition table, which definitely caused some problems. In addition, I needed to format my boot media to GPT when using RUFUS to create the media.

Win8.1 and win10 seemed to install flawlessly, but I must have forgot to install a few drivers, because I was having sleep problems with both OSes. The PC would go to sleep, but when woke from sleep it would not boot back into windows. It would just stay on a black screen. I went back and checked and it turned out that I did miss a driver or so, and the win8.1 installation worked flawlessly afterword.

While troubleshooting, I figured I would dig a bit deeper and inspect the nvme SSD to make sure there was no underlying problems, so I downloaded the intel datacenter ssd tool and took a closer look at the drive. The datacenter tool offers quite a selection of options from command line which is nice. The drive passes all health tests and seems to be operating normally. I also took the time to update the firmware through the tool as well, since you can’t update the firmware through the conventional intel ssd toolbox with the P3600.

6

I’m updating this thread to help anyone else who has issues with the intel P3600 nvme ssd.

After getting familiar with NVME storage and some of the hoops necessary to jump through, I decided to give windows 7 installation a go. I prefer win7 to win8.1 or win10 so I figured I would give it a try.

I got incredibly close to the installation step, but once it starts “copying files” it gives me this error:

“Windows could not format a partition on disk 2. The error occurred while preparing the computer’s system volume. Error code: 0x800424c”

I had fast boot diabled. I had bios set to CSM enabled. I had “Launch PXE 0pROM policy” and “Launch Storage 0pROM policy” set to UEFI only and “Launch PXE 0pROM policy” set to legacy only. I selected UEFI win7 usb stick as boot. I had manually formatted the nvme ssd with a GPT partition table with diskpart. I had the appropriate intel NVME boot driver loaded. Windows finds the drive and partitions during installation, but the 0x800424c error didn’t seem to go away.

I checked intel’s nvme compatibility guide:


and it doesn’t list any ASRock boards as compatibly examples, which is upsetting. Intel does list the 750 ssd as windows 7 compatible with the asrock X99 OC FORMULA here:
http://compatibleproducts.intel.com/ProductDetails?prodSearch=True&searchTerm=750#
but that is a bit of a stretch as I dont have the x99 OC formula and I don’t have a 750 ssd. I can imagine both ssds and motherboards are quite similar though as the intel p3700/p3600/p3500/p3520/750 series use the same driver.

I finally found someone else with a similar problem here:
http://forum.asrock.com/RSS_post_feed.asp?TID=3467
http://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=3467&PN=1&title=x99

It seems that, according to user parsec, Win 7 installation files have the EFI boot loader program/file in a folder that is different from where the Win 7 installation program is coded to look for it. So it can’t find it, and defaults to a Legacy installation. This would make sense, as the win7 installation can’t finish preparing the system volume for my NVME drive.

More information on the process of changing the windows 7 installation files can be found here. Start at option 2, step 11:

I followed both guides as best as I could, but I still could not get the win7 installation to progress. There is a possibility I missed a step or made a simple mistake, but after spending a week experimenting with operating systems on my NVME drive, I needed something that just worked, so I decided to install win8.1 and be done with it.
It’s kinda sad, as I already spent a bunch of time slipstreaming a custom win7 iso with all present updates + the intel NVME drivers + the win7 nvme hotfixes and created a bootable usb drive. It looks like NVME drives natively perform better on win8.1 than 7, as shown here, so no worries:

If anyone is interested in the windows slipstream process, here’s the guide I used:

Thanks for everybody’s help so far!