Win-7 (x64) Installation on a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe, Z170 system.

[Mark-XP]

It took 2 hard and troubled days to achieve that installation and it went unlike described the most guidances i found in the web.

I did have a USB installation stick (Windows 7 x64) with USB3 drivers already Dism-integrated (with which several installations on standard SATA SSDs went well before).
As preliminary, i copied the file C:\Windows\Boot\EFI\bootmgfw.efi (of a running system) to the USD-drives \EFI\BOOT\ folder and renamed it bootx64.efi (bcause it was missing on mine, see here).

It needed two different .inf NVMe drivers from Fernandos's NVMe driver site:

- Phison's (WHQL-signed) "pure" generic 64bit NVMe driver v1.5.0.0 (link)

- and the (unsigned!) original NVMe driver for Samsung’s NVMe SSDs (link)

1) Copy the (four) files of the Phison generic driver to the Inst-USB (for example in a folder x_Phison)

2) Dism-integrate the Samsumg driver to install.wim (section 3 "Professional" in my case). Since the Samsung's driver isn't signed, you have to use the option /ForceUnsigned.

Only that single driver and only to install.wim, nothing else! No KB2990941-v3, no KB3087873-v2: Integrating those hotfixes always made the setup impossible because then it asked for CD-/DVD drivers at the very beginning of the setup, so it wasn't  possible to start the insallation at all. All other NVMe drivers (including the Phison generic!!) that i integrated to install.wim did cause a 0x0000007B bsod at the first boot after the installation!

That's it.
Set the Boot-Mode to UEFI in the Z170 motherboards Bios and start installing Windows. When it comes to the point where the target-partition is to be selected, simply load the Phison driver from the stick: it recognises the 970 NVMe and its (before prepared MBR) partitions perfectly so you may select the target-partition for Win 7 and finish the installation.
In my case it even was a a dual-boot situation: beside Windows XP on the primary partition

I found one other guy (AbsoluteZero, here) who had a very similar situation.

Maybe this small guidance may help to avoid big efforts, trouble and frustrations in the future for some others...

Good Luck, M.

Edited November 21, 2024 by Mark-XP
typo

[lso]

I have quite a bit of experience with this as I did it several times. The way I did it is I cloned it from a non-NVMe drive onto an NVMe drive, but of course it will not boot without the NVMe drivers. So I used powershell (from a USB-booted live WinPE) to slipstream the drivers (using dism) into the cloned install. The drivers I used were directly from the Lenovo website for this laptop. This is after of course slipstreaming the USB-C drivers which I had to do during the initial install when I got the laptop (since this laptop only has USB-C ports). After slipstreaming in the NVMe drivers, it booted up just like before onto the new NVMe drive. I'm using it on this laptop right now.

Edited January 21 by lso

[Mark-XP]

Well, this was the very first time for me to deal with a an NVMe. And since the first (Win-XP) partition was already a clone, it had became somewhat ,personal', to a question of honor, to achieve a clean Windows installation on it.

But anyway, what can you recommend, how do you clone Win-7 partitions? i once did such with (chinese?) Easus Parition Master (9.0), but it inserted a kind of hole in the extended partition (where the Win7 part should reside), so the destination partition was a little bit smaller (in comparison to the source) and the alignment was violated.

Edit: And btw, welcome to msfn, @lso!

Edited January 21 by Mark-XP
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