Can't boot with M.2 SSD installed

[THERAZORKILL]

I just received a Samsung 950 Pro and after installing it and making sure that the PC was still set to boot off of the old drive, I could no longer get into Windows. The system would either leave me with a blinking cursor as if Windows wasn't installed or it would have a multicolor bar across the top of the screen. This happened until I removed the M.2 drive, which is what's allowing me to post this now. I have a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 7 motherboard and was told that this drive would work just fine. However, I can't even boot into Windows to clone my old drive to it. Any help?

[The Official Czex]

Set the boot priority in BIOS.

[THERAZORKILL]

I already tried that. It did nothing, still no boot.

[Master Disaster]

You should update your UEFI to the latest version before trying to use M.2 on a Z97 board.

[THERAZORKILL]

I am running the latest BIOS for my board (version F8), no luck.

[kameshss]

I see no support for 950 Pro for this board http://download.gigabyte.us/FileList/Document/mb_m.2_support.pdf

[The Official Czex]

My guess is that the MOBO doesn't support NVMe on a PCIe lane.

[THERAZORKILL]

I asked Gigabyte and it said that the board supported NVMe with the latest BIOS. Maybe they were just referring to the Intel 750.

It's weird that the board sees it just fine and correctly identifies it, rather than something like "unknown device."

 

EDIT: So I'm shit outta luck...looks like I either send this SSD back or buy a better MOBO. I think it's bullshit that Gigabyte hasn't done this for this MOBO and yet other boards released around the same time work just fine with any NVMe SSD. I guess I won't be buying another Gigabyte board if this is the kind of support they deliver (no joke, some of their lower-end.Z97 boards work with NVMe SSDs).

[THERAZORKILL]

I just got my system to boot with the new drive installed. I got it formatted, installed the NVMe driver from Samsung and cloned the data from my old disk to the new. Unfortunately, I'm back to the same problem after doing that. I get a multicolor bar across the top of the screen and I can't even access the BIOS.

 

It now works as a boot device, but not at full speed (I wasn't expecting full speed due to M.2 using PCIe 2.0 lanes instead of 3.0 on Z97 boards. It is still a bit faster than the 840 EVO that I was upgrading from. Any ideas for trying to get this thing to run at x4 speed instead of x2?