I can confirm its not the drive as I tried booting my m2, ssd as they had windows installations on them.
You know, M.2 SSD, even top-end Samsung drives, can die out of the blue. Two months ago, i had it happen with my 970 Evo Plus 2TB. Drive was less than 30 days old and had bootable W10 OS on it. But then, one day, out of the blue, my PC rebooted and drive was gone. Luckily, i kept my old OS drive, 960 Evo 500GB in the system, as 2nd boot option, and i was able to boot into Win.
After some additional testing, no luck and i had to RMA the 970 Evo Plus 2TB. Now, RMA is complete and i'm enjoying my 2nd 970 Evo Plus 2TB, which runs fine.
So, just because you have OS on your M.2 SSD, doesn't mean the drive works fine. Unless you put that drive into 2nd PC and get it to boot to OS. (Which isn't ideal circumstances due to different hardware, but at least confirms if OS is bootable.)
I even tried a fresh install on the m2, ssd and a diskdrive but it kept restarting on its own an putting me back on the windows didnt load correctly screen.
Another thing, albeit rare, is that even when you install/clone OS to (brand new) drive, something may still go wrong and drive isn't bootable. It happened to me, with the 970 Evo Plus 2TB, that i got from RMA. I did everything correctly (install drive, initiate volume in Disk Management, check Samsung Magician if there is firmware update, use Samsung Data Migration Tool to clone the OS, clone was successful). Yet, when i tried to boot from the brand new drive, past POST, i got BSOD of "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE". I was flabbergasted.
I saw the drive in BIOS and was able to access it as data drive without issues (while booting from my 960 Evo 500GB). I struggled quite a bit with it and what i ended up doing, was the OS clone for 2nd time. This time, drive booted just fine and to this very day, it works without issues.
So, do test your M.2 SSD as bootable drive in 2nd PC, before putting it into this PC.
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If you have USB thumb drive and 2nd PC, you could also try creating live bootable GNU/Linux distro and boot into the GNU/Linux, to see if the issue is with disk drives/Win or somewhere else.
Here's link to the tool to create live bootable GNU/Linux USB drive,
link:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/
It isn't hard to set it up. Though, you'd need at least 4GB USB flash drive. Oh, you can use almost any GNU/Linux distro you like. I too have live bootable GNU/Linux on a USB drive just in case my Win decides to crap out and i can't access my storage drives.
On the above link, there is also a full list of supported distros.
If you don't know which GNU/Linux distro to use, then you can go for Linux Mint (i have it installed on my USB flash drive and i prefer it over other GNU/Linux distros i've tried).
Linux Mint distro download:
https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
Just download GNU/Linux distro, plug in your USB flash drive, start the Universal USB Installer and follow on-screen instructions. Once the installation is complete, reboot your system and after POST, select you USB drive as bootable drive. So that your PC boots into GNU/Linux. Once GNU/Linux starts to load, it presents you several options. One of them is installing GNU/Linux to your disk drive, another is to boot into GNU/Linux from USB flash drive. Select the one that boots into GNU/Linux without installing it. This way, data on your disk drives is safe and entire OS is loaded to RAM (which makes it slow, but still bearable).
If you can boot into GNU/Linux, then the issue is with your disk drive/Win. If you even can't get into GNU/Linux, the issue is somewhere else (most likely MoBo).
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