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So my company orders laptops from Dell, and as per usual ordered one downgraded from Win 10 to Win7. In this case it is a Dell Precision 7510 with an Intel i7 and an SSD Lite On CX2 NVMe 512 GB. The SSD failed pretty quickly and Dell sent someone to replace it. I think he also replaced the Motherboard. Unfortunately trying to boot our Win 7 Pro image failed because this machine has only USB 3, and the standard Win 7 image has no drivers for USB 3. So the guy left before we got to installing Windows, which I now regret. I added USB 3 drivers to the image and got as far into the install as selecting a drive but no drive is found –and it invites me to load a driver for mass storage.

But I cannot find a driver for any Lite On SSD. I’ve never seen an SSD that needed one to be added, actually so not sure if this is the right way to tackle this. I have seen suggestions of using another make of driver and I downloaded a load of different ones including Intel on the theory that’s the chipset. In BIOS I get option for AHCI and RAID On and I tried both with same result. It recognizes different drivers if I check ‘Hide drivers that are not compatible’, depending on RAID or AHCI. But any I can see and load still give no drive visible. DISKPART also fails to find the disk so none of the solutions which involve DISKPART are useful right now.

If it’s relevant when I go to boot options I get: Boot mode – Legacy, Secure boot: Off. Then under legacy boot it shows: M.2 PCIe SSD or Onboard NIC. Under UEFI Boot is : UEFI: CX2-8B512-Q11 NVMe LITEON 512GB. So it’s sort of showing up under Legacy Boot but sort of not properly. Can’t see anything else under BIOS that seems even vaguely relevant.

When I contacted Dell the guy said try installing Windows 10, which works fine, so he said there is no fault and it was therefore not their problem (even though it was definitely ordered as a Windows 7 machine). They also said supplying a Win 7 image was not their problem – although I tried 3 different ones, in case. Any smart people out there got a clue what to do?

Rachel Parker
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  • NVME uses the NVME protocol. Not AHCI. The options for AHCI or (fake)RAID probably refer to SATA connectors. You probably need to add NVME drivers in addition to USB3 drivers. – Hennes Jan 19 '17 at 10:36
  • you need to integrate 2 updates to the Win7 ISo to support NVMe. See my answer in the duplicate link. – magicandre1981 Jan 19 '17 at 16:41

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"it’s sort of showing up under Legacy Boot but sort of not properly" -- this is irrelevant. SDDs can show up with ASCII characters in their name under BIOS mode or with a generic name, but they work fine from a hardware perspective, no problem whatsoever.

Try installing W7 in legacy BIOS mode. Ignore the ASCII string / or general name.

In BIOS classic mode, you should be able to install W7 just fine, but you must have KB2990941 inserted into the install kit. If you get error 0x0000007E you will need to install this fix.

Overmind
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