Win 7 diriver for Z Turbo G2 SSD

[Menchar]

I installed a recent UEFI update (SP98601), and followed the " recommended " installation into a separate EFI partition, and now HP Z440/Win 7 Pro 64 system will not boot from the Z Turbo G2 SSD (Samsung nVME SSD).    Cleaned the Z Turbo drive, reformatted, re-initialized.  Tried installing Win 7 Pro 64 onto the Z Turbo drive from DVD, installation says it needs a driver for the Z Turbo drive.  I cannot find one on the HP support pages , either for the Z Turbo drive or for the HP Z440.    HP Z Turbo G2 Installation manual says to get the Windows 7 driver from http://www.hp.com/go/workstationsupport but I can't find it there or anywhere else on HP support pages.

HP OEM  Win 7 Pro 64 system installed on the original spinning disk still boots all OK, and the Z Turbo drive works all OK with it.  I could use the Z Turbo drive as simple NTFS data volume but prefer to boot from it for performance reasons, as I had been doing for some time.  I purchased the Z Turbo G2 SSD from HP, installed it, installed Win 7 Pro 64 on it, and had been running fine for two years or more using the Z Turbo as the boot drive.  Unfortunately, I can't recall where I got the driver for the Z Turbo when I did the original install.

Appreciate any thoughts on this.

[Menchar · Accepted solution]

I have been able to install WIn 7 Pro 64 onto the Z Turbo G2 NVMe SSD in my Z440 workstation.  I had the original Win 7 install on the 1TB spinner disk delivered with the Z440, and I had a Win 7 Pro 64 SP1 install DVD that I had bought at Fry's.  I did not use the HP supplied OS DVD's, they couldn't be used to do an install on the Z Turbo drive.  I don't believe HP ever supported booting from a Z Turbo G2 SSD on the Z440, though IIRC someone at HP indicated it should work, and the Z Turbo installation manual discusses OS installation.  I had been booting from the Z Turbo for about two years, then the partitions were corrupted by a UEFI update, and I had to re-create the install I performed two years ago when I first got the system.  After several days of trying I succeeded this evening.

1.  I booted the original Win 7 OS on the 1TB spinner drive delivered with the Z440.  I had tried booting from the Win7 install DVD but it demanded a DVD driver before doing an install.  Note that nearly all NVMe install guidance says to disconnect all other drives when installing Win 7 on a NVMe SSD, but I did it anyway.

2.  I started the install by launching setup.exe in the root directory of the Win7 install DVD.

3.  The install did a popup indicating that it needed a driver for the NVMe drive, and I loaded a  Win 7 Samsung NVMe driver from a USB flash drive.  I found the unpacked Samsung NVME driver here after hours of searching. 

https://www.win-raid.com/t29f25-Recommended-AHCI-RAID-and-NVMe-Drivers.html

Now that I've used this driver, IIRC on the original install two years ago I found an unpacked driver on the Samsung website.  I needed the unpacked driver as I had an install DVD only, not USB or ISO image and wanted to avoid all of that if possible.

4.  The install proceeded as expected, several restarts, each offering two or sometimes three OS's for boot - I let the selection menu time out and pick its own default every time.  Wound up finally with Win Pro 7 SP1 installed all OK on the Z Turbo G2 500GB drive.

Unfortunately I lost the original partition and all installed apps as I had to clean the NVMe SSD using diskpart command line tool, reformat and re-initialize.  But I am back to being able to boot Win7 from the Z Turbo G2 drive.  Disheartening that HP is useless when it came to doing this originally and that their "important" UEFI update trashed the partitions on the MVMe drive in the first place.  IIRC a "live" HP employee told me two years ago when I bought the Z Turbo drive that this would work, but that it wasn't supported by HP and I couldn't use the HP supplied Win 7 DVDs to do it.

After having worked with HP computer systems for literally 40 years or more (HP 1000 minis, then HP PC workstations) nothing they do surprises me when it comes to letting the customer down.  Go figure - I went and bought a pricey Z440  for my personal use when I retired.  The Z440 itself has been solid - it was the UEFI update that did me in. 

At one time I had five full HP1000 minis up and running, and 70+ programmers using them (HP RTE was multi-user) on three shifts 24/7.  I had a 24/7 service contract with HP.  I remember having a problematic line printer (this was in the 80's) that screwed me over time and again.  I really lit up HP about it and a dozen other problems I had with their hardware, the service guys said the district manager was scared silly of me, the service guys thought that was funny - it wasn't their fault the hardware was flaky.  "Another happy HP customer" they told each other 😉