I've noticed a lot of people seem to be having some issues with the 950 Samsung NVMe installations.
I have the G752VY series (the one with the 980M Geforce).
I bought a Samsung 950 PRO 512 Gig NVMe SSD.
I bought a Samsung 850 EVO 1 Terabyte
1) Opened up laptop and replaced the 1 Terabyte HDD with Samsung 850 EVO 2.5 Sata SSD.
2) Added in the Samsung PRO 512 NVMe SSD to the other m2 slot available (the first slot was occupied by the default Samsung 951 128 Gig SSD that came factory installed.
3) Loaded up windows as regular (didn't do anything or touch bios, so it's booting as regular from the 128 gig SSD
4) ALL new drives recognized (the 850 Pro and the 950 Pro) by windows, though they are not initiallized or partitioned just yet. At this point, with the new Samsung 950 NVMe added but with nothing on it just yet, the computer had no problem loading up into windows or even detecting it as a drive from the default windows partition manager
5) Used the Samsung Migration Software to CLONE default SSD (128 gig Samsung 951 NVMe) to the Samsung 950 PRO 512 NVMe drive.
6)I partitioned the Samsung 850 drive
7) Now here is where the problems began. It seems the bios has an issue recognizing BOTH m2 SSD drives at once. The bios just gave two of the exact same boot up options (the Samsung 951 default drive). Previously, there was NO issue when I had not cloned windows to the 950 PRO drive yet . But now that I had cloned the 951 to the 950 drive and had BOTH drives in the m2 slots, there was an issue and windows would NOT boot up (i got the dreaded blue error screen during startup and would be taken to Advanced Startup Options menu -- nothing fixed it)
😎 I tried swapping the m2 drives into each other's slot. Still no fix. I tried removing the 850 SSD and putting back the default 2.5 HDD. No fix. I even tried booting up with nothing in the SATA 2.5 slot (no HDD or 850 SSD). Still would not boot.
9) It worked when I removed the ORIGIONAL 128 Samsung 951 NVMe from the m2 slot, and ONLY had the SAMSUNG 950 PRO 512 in. At this point, the computer booted up just fine and windows 10 worked wonderfully. Both the Samsung EVO 850 and the Samsung 950 PRO now work. Speeds of the Samsung read at about 2.5 gigs and write at about 1.5-2 gigs -- SO the speeds are NVMe level and the drive is working.
So final points:
The bios (at least on my G752VY) does not seem to support TWO m2 drives that are NVMe (when each drive is a clone of the other). As stated, I was able to boot up with both m2 NVME drives in when the SAMSUNG 950 was empty. once I cloned the other drive to it, it stopped. I'm not sure if this is a bios issues. If I can format the origional Samsung 951 SSD so there is no bootable windows / cloned drive data on it, it may work just fine. But it's a bitch to try and wipe it, since I can't have both drives in at once so I have not yt.
I also bought a ROG GL552 and a Samsung EVO 850 m2 SATA III drive. I had issues with cloning the HDD and booting from the SSD, but figured it out. I'll post this solution in another thread.
Anyways, hope that helps you guys!
