I've managed to successfully install a bootable version of Windows 7 Pro 64-Bit on an M.2 drive, and I'm going to share what I did here so hopefully it helps someone else out, because this shaz took forever.
Here's what I started with:
- My PC, already running 64-bit Win7Pro off of an Intel SATA SSD and an ASUS Maximums VII Hero mainboard
- a Samsung SM951 256GB AHCI MZHPV256HDGL-00000 M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD - OEM
- an ISO of Windows 7 Profressional 64-Bit
- a 4GB USB pen drive (mine was only a 2.0, but 3.0 is certainly preferrable!)
The first thing I needed to do was make my USB pen drive into a UEFI bootable installer version of Windows 7.
To do that, I followed OPTION TWO
here. IMPORTANT: Step 11 is crucial to making this work with 64-bit Win7.
I then powered down and followed this tutorial video
here. IMPORTANT: I did not disable CSM, I DID disable Fastboot, and I also made sure my PCIex4 slot was specifically selected to M.2 via
this tutorial.
However, before I got to the point of selecting my UEFI USB pen drive and trying to install Windows, I figured out I needed to convert the SM951 from MBR to GPT, so I did that using OPTION TWO
here.
With all of my USB stuff disconnected besides my mouse, keyboard, and pen drive, I completely turned off my system, disconnected my SATA SSD, and turned my system back on.
I then tapped F8 to load the UEFI boot menu and made sure to select the UEFI version of my USB pen drive (both that and a legacy version are shown!).
I was then able to follow the rest of the main video tutorial for installing Windows 7 on the M.2 with success.
I feel like I'm forgetting something . . . it's been a long day.
I REMEMBER: I also made sure that I had the latest version of the BIOS installed from ASUS, which did require an additional USB drive, or doing that process BEFORE formatting the USB drive for use as a Windows installer.
