How to install Windows 7 on Samsung 950 PRO

The drivers listed in this guide are for the Clevo P870DM, if you have a diff. model but with the same SSD, then simply look for the Windows 7 Drivers for your laptop on Sager's site.

Disclaimer: Backup your data, I am not responsible for any data loss incurred as we will need to wipe / format the SSD

Note: Using the Win 7 Creator Utility did not work for me under Windows 10, it would never finish mounting/unmounting the image so I had to use a Windows 7 system to create the ISO. You may also try a Windows 8 system but I cannot confirm if that will work or not.

Warning: While I was able to successfully install Windows 7, I do not recommend it, I quickly formatted my system and installed Windows 10 again. Reason being, Windows 7 takes about 20-30 seconds to boot if you have an NVMe drive, it just wasn't designed to work with these drives. While operating within the Windows system was snappy, I cannot live with such a slow boot as I do restart a lot. Installing drivers and rebooting after each install was a nightmare!

1) Download Rufus

2) Run Rufus by right clicking on it and choosing Run as Administrator

3) Insert a USB 3.0 Flash Disk with a capacity of 4GB or above

4) Set the options in Rufus as per the below image to create the image of the Windows 7 ISO, you will need to point Rufus to the location of where you have your Windows 7 ISO obviously.



5) Now that we have a Windows 7 USB Flash Disk, we need to integrate the USB 3.0 Drivers in it

6) Download the Windows 7 USB 3.0 Creator Utility v3.0 then extract the contents to a folder

Note: If your current OS is Windows 8 or 10, then download the file named: Win7-USB3.0-Creator-V3.zip . If your current OS is Windows 7, then you want to download the file named Win7-USB3.0-Creator-V3-Win7Admin.zip

7) Run the file named Installer_Creator.exe and once you get a Windows asking you for the location of hte USB Flash disk, point it to the drive letter of the USB Flash Disk we just used to make the Windows 7 ISO and let it do its magic, this process will take about 40 minutes to complete

8) Now, grab another USB Flash Disk and place the Samsung NVMe Drivers on it, not the RAR file, but the extracted folder which contain the drivers.

9) Now go to your BIOS and disable UEFI boot so that we are booting in legacy mode

10) Shutdown your computer, and remove all other drives except for the drive you are installing Windows 7 on, which in our case is the 950 PRO. If you have more than one drive in your computer, the Windows installer will place your boot files on the second drive which is very bad for both performance reasons and will cause headaches when you backup your OS drive as an image, then come to restore it one day when you need to and you will not be able to boot since it wouldn't have the boot files.

11) With the Windows 7 USB Flash Disk inserted into your laptop, restart and keep hitting the F7 key to get the boot menu options, then select to boot from the USB Flash Disk

12) Once at the Windows 7 Setup screen, accept the license agreement

13) Once you are at the drive/partition selection screen choice, you will notice that the list is empty, not insert the 2nd USB Flash Disk which contains the Samsung 950 PRO drivers and wait for about 30 seconds

14) Now hit BROWSE to and navigate to the 2nd USB Flash drive selecting the Samsung NVMe Driver v1.4.7.16 folder and wait for about 20 seconds till the driver is loaded.

15) Once the driver is loaded, you will see the drive appear in the partition selection screen, do not hit enter YET. Your SSD is probably initialized as a GPT disk so we need to convert it to MBR first.

16) Press SHIFT + F10 to pull up the command prompt window, then type the following:

DISKPART
LIST DISK
SELECT DISK X (where X corresponds to the drive letter of your Samsung 950 PRO SSD, usually it would be 0)
CLEAN

17) Now go back to the Partition selection in the Windows 7 setup and click on the blue refresh icon

18) Now you will see your SSD unpartitioned, go ahead and create a partition, leave about 20% unpartitioned space for over provisioning, so multiply the total capacity of your SSD in GB by 0.8

Example for my 512GB 950 PRO is: 512GB x 0.8 = 409GB so I choose a 400GB as I don't like to have such a weird number as a 409GB partition

so what I do is: 409.1*1024 = 409704 MB

the reason I put 0.1 is without the 0.1, a 400.0 GB partition will appear as 399.9 GB in Windows so I gave it that extra 0.1GB to have an exact 400 GB partition

19) Now hit next to start the installation, if during the setup you notice the file copy progress freeze at a certain percentage and not move, do not panic, just quickly remove the USB Flash Disk and quickly reinsert it back and the progress will continue. I had to do this twice during my setup.

20) Follow the below guide to complete the rest of the installation and make sure to check out the thread below it to know which Windows Updates to hide

NBR Windows 7 Clean Installation Guide

Updates to hide to prevent Windows 10 Upgrade / Disable Telemetry

21) Once you are in Windows, install the Windows6.1-KB2990941-v3-x64 (NVME Hotfix). Please download it from another computer and copy it to a USB Flash Disk as we want to install this ASAP

22) Download the Windows 7 Drivers from Sager's Website and install them as per the below order, the fingerprint Driver for Windows 10 works just fine on Windows 7 so use that as there is no separate Windows 7 Driver for it.

23) Download the Samsung NVMe Driver and install it. It is located in the middle of the page.

 

What happens when you run more than one drive with multiple oses on them?

 

I don't do multiple OSes so you need to figure that out.

 

I did figure it out. Right after the drive came out, but they had other issues. Was checking to see if those were fixed now. Thanks.

 

What I did was installed W7 with no other drives installed. Then installed W10 with no other drives installed. Then install all the drives. After doing it that way you can use F7 to select the OS you want to boot, or use EasyBCD to add the W7 OS to the W10 Windows Boot Manager. This only seems to work so long as you use the W10 Boot Manager to load Windows 7. I have Windows 7 running in UEFI mode for the first time ever, but the BIOS has to be set a specific way or it will not work at all. Legacy is better all the way around.

 

Sorry to hijack the thread, but Mr. Fox way for multi boot is my prefered way to run as well, however I had issues with that setup before: When I set up dual boot on my laptop (Win 8 and Win7), originaly booting Win8 would erase Win7 disk (yes, erase it fully to blank, twice), then later it would change Win7 disk to become non bootable. I don't even remember anymore how I fixed both problems (took couple weeks, multiple tries, but it works well now), but now I'm thinking of upgrading Win8 to Win 10, with dual booting to Win7 as primary, but I don't want to deal with this nonsense again of Win 10 messing up my Win 7 disk. So the the question is will I have similar problems with Win 10, as I had with Win 8? BTW both copies of Windows are 100% legit. And I want 2 independent, bootable disks, with choice of boot disk from BIOS.
BTW the way it works now, if I want Win8 (original, came with laptop on HDD) I boot using UEFI, If I want Win7 (most of the time) I use legacy mode and that will use my msata ssd as boot. I do not want any boot manager, If I loose one of my disks, with boot manager I can loose access to both drives, the way I have it now, I can loose either disk and still have fully working computer.

 

Quick question. I did this before finding this page. I did not do step 15. I let it install into the unpartitioned space. What problems is this going to cause for me? Thank you.

 

nothing, you can simply shrink the volume to create some space for OP (Over provisioning). I recommend you shrink it to have a 20-30% unpartitioned space for garbage collection if you don't need the entire space that is.

 

Hi everyone and thanks Phoenix for this guide. I managed to enter the installation process and to see the drive. I cleaned the 950 Pro with diskpart and created a new partition. The system automatically creates two of them: the first one is 100 MB reserved for system, and the second one 476 GB. My question is: what I should do now taking into account that this is a nvme drive? Does it change something from the ahci type?

I read in the guide " leave about 20% unpartitioned space for over provisioning, or garbage collection". What does this mean exactly? And, above all, is this really necessary and what are the advantages of doing so? I apologise if this is a silly question, but these drives are pretty expensive and "wasting" 20% of the space leaves me a bit worried.

Thanks again for the help,
Carlo

 

it's not a must, free space can also be used for garbage collection but to be on the safe side, it is recommended to over-provision to ensure there is enough free space always left for garbage collection.

What is overprovisioning??

 

Hi,

I got stuck at step# 14 as picture shown below, any solution?

Samsung 950 pro 512gb
Asus Z97I Plus motherboard
Windows 7 64bit ultimate sp1

Thanks.

 

See:
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/3rvoop/samsung_950_pro_nvme_ssd_windows_7_64/

Don't know if this will help or not (first google hit...).

 

I just updated the driver, same version but specific for Windows7, please try again.

 

I've tried Samsung NVMe drivers v1.4.7.17 WHQL for Win7, but still out of luck.

 

I was able to installed win7 64bit without the driver(if no uefi-only but legacy mode in bios), but it just boot into safe mode selection and won't pass it as picture shown below. Any solution? Thanks.

 

Windows 7 USB 3.0 Creator Utility updated to v3.0

Download Windows 7 USB 3.0 Creator Utility v3.0

 

Great job @Phoenix ... Thanks!

 

Hello guys ! First of all thanx Phoenix for that guide .You are helping a lot of people that are not so techy and want to enjoy their nuc. I have still not got mine but im avidly read all the forums posts so that when it will come i can configure and use it as soon as possible as i already sold my previous desktop for that cutie. I cannot for sure install windows 10 , im seeing nightmares on the night appearing suddenly on my computer and i would prefer to put OS/360 than that thing. Well all good about drivers support and etc even if its a pain in the a** i think it's realy worth all the trouble but i just cant handle my new cutie to make 30 sec to boot the os. And now maybe my super noob question. If i install an AHCI SSD would it be better? i have seen that the Kingston HyperX Predator and Mushkin Atlas Vital are Nuc skull compatible. Is that protocol better supported in Win 7 ? Thanx for your time and again for your awesome guide.

 

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@Mr. Fox

So tell me your settings to install Windows 7 in UEFI Mode and in RAID mode on NVMe SSDs

Shall I enable CSM? Are your disks initialized as GPT or MBR

When I tried installing in UEFI + GPT on the RAID Array, after the first restart in the setup phase, the Windows 7 splash screen loading just hangs and never continues to the setup

 

You have to use CSM and set UEFI for everything except video, and that should fix the behavior you are experiencing with the hanging at the splash screen. You need GOP video support for UEFI and Windows 7 uses VGA. In your BIOS enable CSM and on the CSM menu choose the option for Legacy and UEFI. Everything except for video can be UEFI. Video needs to be set to Legacy.

I have two 512GB 960 Pro in RAID0, two 1TB 840 EVO in RAID0 and a 2TB Barracuda 7200 RPM drive for data. All of the SSDs are GPT. The 2TB spinner is MBR.

 

ok thanks,, but are your disks initialized as GPT or MBR? we know that GPT is the recommended way for UEFI

 

All of the SSDs are GPT. Only the spinner is MBR. I mentioned that in an edit of the previous posts as you were asking in a new post.

 

ok I bought a new Key from Kinguin as I sold my recently purchased key a few months back to a moderator. got a new key for 35 bucks with the protection

 

@Mr. Fox nope, still hanging at the Windows loading splash screen even though I set the BIOS to UEFI with CSM and by default the video is set to legacy and everything else to UEFI. I also tried setting everything to legacy but no luck. I will try to install it in Legacy then without UEFI

 

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