P50 does not detect 950 Pro M.2 SSD at BIOS level

[david376]

Hi,

I have a serious issue with my P50. The configuration that I ordered is the following:

- Xeon E3-1505M v5

- NVIDIA Quadro M2000M 4 Go

-  8GB DDR4-2133 SODIMM

- Full HD screen, not tactile
- Windows 10 Home
- 500GB HD 7200RPM
- BIOS version 1.15

When it arrived, before making any changes to the hardware, I turned it on to verify quickly that the laptop arrived on good condition and to create a recovery usb. Then I installed the 950 Pro on the ssd0 slot and 2x8GB DDR4 on the free easily accesible slots and proceeded to make a clean windows 10 installation on the 950 Pro with all the required drivers and after, on the same 950 Pro, I also installed Ubuntu 14.04 in another partition.

Everything seemed to work just fine (with the exception of the wifi under Ubuntu, which I managed to solve after) until suddenly under Ubuntu the computer stopped responding so I had to power it off the hard way (keeping pressed the power button for about 5 seconds) and after that when I turned on the computer i got the following error message: 2100: Detection error on SSD1 (M.2) Press Esc to continue.

I thought that probably something was wrong with the grub so I decided to boot with a live Ubuntu usb and then I realized that the ssd did't appeared as a connected drive. I thought it might be a problem mounting the drive due to the way I turned it off so I tried booting with the windows 10 installation usb I used before and the same, the ssd did not appeared as a connected drive so I decied to check if the 950 Pro actually appeared or not as connected in the bios and indeed it did not appeared as connected. At this point I was really worried so I just rebooted the machine with no special idea in mind, and to my surprise, it booted with no issue, the error mentioned above did not appeared. I had no idea what happened but I was happy everything seemed to work normally again so I proceeded to install some stuff on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 14.04 and after some hours, running under Ubuntu again, the laptop stopped responding (again) so with a little bit of fear I turned it off keeping the power button pressed and the same 2100: Detection error appeared again!

I tried to solve it doing everything that I did the first time that happed with no luck. Then, to check if whether it was a problem with the ssd or with the laptop, I moved the 950 Pro from the ssd0 slot to the ssd1 slot and when turning on the computer it booted with no issue with both Windows 10 and Ubuntu. With the 950 Pro on the slot ssd1 I spent some time trying to get the wifi to work and installing some other stuff, no problem appeared.

After some hours playing with Ubuntu I moved back the 950 Pro back to the ssd0 slot just to see if the problem got "magically" fixed like the first time but no, the problem was (and is still) there. The Samsung 950 Pro ssd is not detected on the ssd0 slot.

Do anybody have any suggestion to solve this? Any help would be appreciated.

[jmegas]

I do not have your exact problem, but I am having lots of problems with installing a Samsung 950 Pro in a machine which came from Lenovo configured very similar to yours.  I have the Xeon E3-1505M v5, the NVidia Quadro M2000M, and shipped with the 500GB HDD and Windows 10 Home. (I have the 4K screen.)  I have posted in two other threads regarding my issues, so you should read them as you proceed.

Lenovo is trying to blame the additional 24 GB of Corsair DDR4 2133 (PC1700) memory I have added, but I'm confident that is a red herring.  I think that their machine is not properly compatible with the Samsung 950 Pro NVMe and I think they should care and do something about it.

From what I've been reading there are a number of us who want Samsung 950 Pros to work in our P50 and P70 computers and Lenovo should, in my opinion, support us on this.

[Maximus2016]

I installed a 950 Pro and I have not seen any problem, however, I am not booting from it (yet).

The 1.17 BIOS update seems to update something related to M.2 Drives.

[jmegas]

Thank you!  I didn't know about the 1.17 BIOS update.  Now I have to figure out how to run it.  :-(

I knew the former Lenovo software, but they have changed it a bit.

[Maximus2016]

@jmegas running their executable BIOS update is really easy. But if you are not familiar with executing BIOS updates, please proceed with extreme caution and read all the instructions extremely carefully.

Messing up on a BIOS update, or installing the wrong update, will make the PC totally unusable and you will have to send it back to Lenovo for repair. This is not like some video driver or ethernet driver when you can uninstall it or try again. If it messes up, game over!!

[jmegas]

I've done 100s of BIOS updates in my day--even flushed a BIOS once--but I just can't find the System Update tool in the new software on my P50.  I know where it is on my older Lenovos, I just can't find it reliably.

[Maximus2016]

I took the easy way out and just ran the Windows BIOS installer. It does the flashing, automatically reboots it, etc.

http://support.lenovo.com/ca/en/products/Laptops-and-netbooks/ThinkPad-P-Series-laptops/ThinkPad-P50...

Anyway, it's obvious that if you are posting on this board then you probably know what you are doing. My warnings were mainly for anyone else who found this thread through google or something.

[jmegas]

Thank you!

Sorry, I apologize for being a little abrupt in my first response.  I have owned this P50 for almost two weeks and I can't even keep it booted reliably for 10 minutes.  This is extremely frustrating!

I just can't seem to find System Update the way I could on my other machines.

Thanks again for your help!

Unfortunately the outcome was bad.  As I feared, the system crashed during a BIOS update and will no longer boot.  I figured this might happen, because the system had not been stable.  Fortunately I already have a box coming from Lenovo for an earlier failure.

[david376]

I updated the BIOS to the version 1.17 with no luck, the laptop still doesn't detect the ssd on the ssd0 slot.

[jmegas]

I'm very sorry to hear that.

Mine won't even boot now, so I guess Lenovo will have to flash the BIOS.  I was surprised that there wasn't a way to flash the BIOS from a thumb drive, but they told me there wasn't.  <sigh>

This has certainly been frustrating.