Windows 8.1 and HDD's getting on my last nerve - GE62 2QD-081

This is the model with the i7-5700 (HM87 chipset), 1TB HDD, 3x M.2 slots (one is PCIe capable), and GTX960m.

CPU-Z
http://valid.x86.fr/td168u

Anyways, I've been running this thing stock, with Windows 8.crap and whatever cheap piece of crap mechanical hard drive this thing came with. Suffice it to say, I'm quite fed up with it. I've gotten a Samsung SM951 PCIe M.2 SSD, and for the life of me, I absolutely CANNOT get an OS installed on it. Can anyone please help me??

I've tried creating a bootable USB drive, a CD, and even a freaking NAS and network booted. IT WILL NOT INSTALL!!

 

Do what I did, disconnect HDD and then install whatever you want on SSD (I installed Win 7, I dislike Win 8). But first of all to install Win 7 you need to set BIOS for legacy mode , UEFI didn't work for me, with Win 7.
Also, after installing Win 7 I hooked up HDD and could easily switch from BIOS between booting into msata Win 7 and HDD Win 8 (just in case I need to return my Apache for warranty repair etc I left Win 8 intact, otherwise I use HDD for large amounts of data storage. Originally I run into problem where booting into Win 8 would erase my msata, I fixed that but I don't remember how, then booting Win8 would make Win7 non bootable which I also fixed somehow, now all works like a champ, so do yourself a favor, do full backup of everything, is much, much faster restoring from backup, than reinstalling everything from beginning, in case something goes wrong and that Win8 is real piece of work.
Remember 1 thing: Win 8 and Win 10 use UEFI BIOS mode, Win 7, look for legacy mode, but I'm not 100% sure your MSI has one, my older GE60 Apache had it, but at some point they may stop providing it.

 

I think in order to install on a PCIe drive, you need to be installing in UEFI. Unfortunately, you need win8+ to do that. There's a bunch of secure boot stuff you need to deal with to install Win7 with UEFI.. I've had too many beers to comprehend that right now. Tomorrow, though, is when I'll figure it out.

 

It is a lot easier on windows 8.1/10 to pull off yes.

 

Anything beyond Windows 7 is horse droppings though.

 

You can do it on Windows 7 but you need USB flash drive plugged in USB 2.0 port with the correct storage driver to see the SSD.

 

+1 to this. General rule of thumb is if your PC/motherboard is newer than when the OS was released, you WILL need an Intel INF driver to tell the OS how to communicate with the drive.

Can't expect an old OS to have the needed drivers out of the box.

 

I would love to do slipstream on IRST driver myself but I found out that I couldn't because it's not universal unlike Microsoft's basic AHCI driver, which can cause BSOD during initialization.

 

It looks the PCIe drive and the HM87 mobile chipset needs the drive to be formatted in GPT, and not MBR, in order for it to work.. Right now I'm running a Windows 7 SanDisk Ultra SSD. It isn't the PCIe drive, but it's still worlds better than the HDD I was running Windows 8.1 off of.