V7-482PG Strange mSata issue (not detecting)

I havea  strange issue with my v7-482pg's msata..

I reformatted the drives recently for the first time. I wanted a clean install so I deleted all my drives (the main hard drive, the reserved system partitions, and the ssd) and formatted all the drives. Obviously I lost the ability to use expresscache because of the way the system works... but I had read several places that Intel's Rapid Storage Technology would work better anyway, so I thought I would go with that.

Once I installed windows 8.1 pro on the main HDD, and booted into windows, I noticed that I can't see my SSD. Tried diskpart, disk management, still not showing. I go back to the bios and the main page shows HDD0 (main drive) and SSD, but no option to boot into the SSD in the boot option list (another issue... it seems my boot only works using legacy mode. UEFI won't boot). The ONLY place i can see the SSD other than the list of components in the BIOS main page is when I plug in my usb with win8.1pro on it. I can see the drive in the list of drives to install windows to. I've tried leaving it unallocated, formatting it, and nothing worked.

Eventually I gave in and decided to just format my main drive again, and reinstall windows to the main HDD. I did this and it worked. I could see the SSD in windows and everything. I downloaded and installed Intel's RST and transferred some files over from my external. But when I reboot my computer the same issue arose. I can't see the SSD, and intel RST shows "internal empty port 1" where it should display the SSD. diskpart and disk management also don't display the drive. I'm really frustrated with the whole thing at this point... and have looked all over the internet (yes i have AHCI enabled) but still can't get it functioning. I don't want to format only to lose it again but if there's a solid way to prevent it from removing after a restart again then I will.