All,
I created this account for the express purpose of (hopefully) making the installation process a little easier for those who may have trouble installing Windows 7 on their new Intel 750 SSD. After going through tremendous difficulty, I figured the least I could do is to lessen the pain for someone else.
My motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 7
Here are the things that I had to do to get things working. Note that these are not necessarily in order:
1.) Have Windows 7 either on DVD or USB (using the Windows USB Installation Tool available from the Gigabyte support site). Though Gigabyte claims that the USB installer is necessary, I found that not to be the case for me.
2.) Change the 'storage boot option control' to "UEFI only" in BIOS
3.) Change/maintain 'windows 8 features' in 'other OS' in BIOS
-steps 2 and 3 are described with pictures in the 'Boot Guide for NVMe SSD pdf file:
http://download.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/nvme_boot_guide_332098001us.pdf
4.) Have driver CD (included with SSD) on hand, or load Intel NVMe drivers (from Intel website's drivers and downloads section) onto USB. I used the CD.
== KEY STEP THAT I MISSED AT FIRST ==
5.) Convert the Intel 750 SSD to a GPT partition (vice MBR). I wasted so much time struggling until I figured this out.
Here's what I did:
-Used Win 8.1 CD that I had on hand (from HTPC), and booted to that drive in UEFI mode (hit F12 to bring up boot menu). From there, I used the built-in parstition utility:
a. From inside Windows Setup, press Shift+F10 to open a command prompt window.
b. Open the diskpart tool:
diskpart
Identify the drive to reformat:
list disk
Select the drive, and reformat it:
select disk <disk number> clean convert gpt exit
I'm told you can also use a Linux program (GNU Parted) to do the same thing. I wound up with the disk being divided into 3 separate partitions.
==END STEP THAT I MISSED AT FIRST ==
6.) Once done with the GPT partitioning, boot Windows 7 in UEFI mode, and then install the necessary NVMe driver from step 4.
7.) Install Win7 into the 'primary' partition of the SSD (this was partition 3 for me).
Installation should go smoothly from there. I was getting error after error when trying to do steps 6 and 7 without doing step 5 first.
I hope this was of some help.