G752VL with Samsung EVO 960 not recognized by Magician

[ST9752]

Okay, I know that Magician is not really critical to have. I simply wanted to test my NVMe a bit and in particular see what version of firmware is on it so I could tell if I need to update the firmware.

The drive is recognized by Windows 10 on my G752VL with no problem. Yes, I initialized it with a GUID partition type not MBR. I was able to quick format and the drive appears normally to the system.

Still though after rebooting and power cycling Magician doesn't see it at all.

I dropped into BIOS which also sees the drive (obviously) and it is not shown among the SATA devices as expected.

I'm wondering if having my SATA interface set to RAID in BIOS is causing the trouble. Will the system still boot from the spinning drive if I change the mode to AHCI?

One strange thing happened upon first install. I installed the drive, closed up the machine and restarted it. It started coming up, displayed the ROG logo for a moment and then did a hard shutdown. After that everything was normal. Odd.

I should note, this is a retail - sealed - 960 EVO 500GB from Best Buy.



PS - My apologies if this topic is covered. Every time I tried to use the forum search bar, it disappeared! Anybody else seen that?

[Julskey]

You must be in AHCI mode to use Samsung magician to see the drive properly. As Justinthyme already said, no benefits from using Samsung magician aside from upgrading firmware on the drive. If you are now in SATA mode and want to change to AHCI mode, simply go to system config and click boot to safemode on boot tab. Restart laptop. Immediately before windows restarts, go to bios and change raid to AHCI. save and exit. Laptop boots to safe mode. go to system config and untick boot to safe mode. apply changes and restart normally. Never tried 960 but this worked with 950 pro.

[ST9752]

Yeah, that's really all I wanted to use Magician for was to check/update the drive firmware.

Thanks. Will give it a shot.

[Clintlgm]

Be sure you create an Drive Image of your OS Drive before you do anything. Insure what ever program you use to make this Image, I like Macrium Reflect Free others should work. What ever be sure to boot up with the recovery media and can see your backed up Image. Then you can play around with your BIOS and OS Drive Insure you note what the original setting are in your BIOS before changing things just in case you need to go back to stock settings.

[ST9752]

Good advice indeed and what I already have done. When it comes to things like boot changes, migration, etc. I don't do anything without a full system image and it's usually Macrium. I have used Acronis in the past as well.

[Darnassus]

.. try not to mess around with NVMe on this generation. Since they don't natively support them, it's a nightmare when things go wrong.

I had reinstalled Win10 once and after it seemed like the Controller died.. NVMe wouldn't show up ever during boot, and when you inserted it and checked via Disk Manager, it'd say it has 16,384gb, yes gigabytes.. (how wondrous would that be?) with 1gb available.

Weird stuff.

Just my experience as a warning.. :c

[ST9752]

Double post, oops

[ST9752]

The machine isn't much use to me without using the NVMe drive as the boot drive so I'll figure it out. I know others around here have, but it's not necessarily fun. 🙂

What do you mean "not natively supported"?

I had no trouble switching from RAID to AHCI in BIOS and now at least Magician can see the drive and check the firmware version.

[ST9752]

I finished the whole process just using Samsung Data Migration. It was cake! Here is my description for those considering the EVO 960 drive.

https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?96130-G752VL-and-Samsung-EVO-960-SSD-Too-easy!

[Darnassus]

ST9752 wrote:
I finished the whole process just using Samsung Data Migration. It was cake! Here is my description for those considering the EVO 960 drive.

https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?96130-G752VL-and-Samsung-EVO-960-SSD-Too-easy!

Meaning, it doesn't show up as an ordinary drive without manually loading an INTEL IRST Driver through Windows install.