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    Clevo P650SG with SM951 Boot Issues

    Discussion in 'Sager and Clevo' started by trias10, Sep 1, 2015.

  1. trias10

    trias10 Notebook Consultant

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    Hello,

    I am experiencing some very strange behaviour with my recent P650SG and I wanted to find out if anyone else with a similar setup is seeing identical issues. I have a P650SG with a Samsung SM951 M.2 PCIe SSD as the sole boot drive (C drive with Windows 7 x64 on it). I believe the cause of all my problems is having this drive as the boot/OS drive.

    The issue I'm seeing is that any time I try to boot into Safe Mode, all of the Safe Mode drivers load fine, then I see the Windows Safe Mode login screen, however the computer will then immediately reboot without me touching anything. Normal Windows booting works fine, I can boot into and log into Normal Windows without issue, just Safe Mode doesn't work. Additionally, trying to schedule a Windows disk check at next startup (via chkdsk /F) also does not work, I can see the pre-login chkdsk black screen with text, but it immediately aborts and boots Windows normally. Hence, I think there is something fishy going on with how this computer boots this drive. As far as I know, PCIe wasn't designed to serve up boot drives to the CPU, and the SM951 does not have a bootloader on it (confirmed in the Anandtech review); Clevo has built some sort of jiggery-pokery into their BIOS to let you boot this drive and install Windows on it, both in UEFI and Legacy/CSM (I installed Windows 7 on it using regular Legacy/MBR mode), however it might somehow be broken when it comes to Safe Mode or chkdsk. I'm using the latest Prema v2 BIOS as I cannot find any links to the legitimate ones.

    Finally, this is a brand new installation of Windows 7, I installed it a few days ago, and the only things I have installed so far are all of the drivers and all Windows Updates (except for any windows update driver recommendations).

    I am curious if anyone at all who has a similar setup has encountered any similar issues? Or if perhaps anyone knows of any possible fixes? I have tried looking for updated SM951 firmware, but have not been able to find any. Would greatly appreciate any help with this issue.
     
    trias10, Sep 1, 2015
    #1