Cannot get Windows installed on M.2 drive

BelgianDutchman · March 2, 2021

I bought a 500GB WD Black SN750 NVME M.2 drive for my old PC. Windows was already installed on an old SATA SSD (120GB Samsung 840 SSD) but I wanted a fresh installation on the M.2.

I installed the new SSD on my motherboard and checked that I could access it from the existing Windows installation. I turned the PC off, and I downloaded the Windows ISO from here, and then followed this guide to create a recovery medium on a USB drive from my Macbook. In hindsight I could have used the PC with the existing Windows installation to do it, but it's so cluttered and slow so I couldn't be bothered.

I booted into the recovery medium, went through the installation process and formatted all drives (m.2 SSD and SATA SSD) and removed all partitions, and let the installer run. It said a reboot was required to continue the installation, but after rebooting it just brings me to the beginning of the process on the recovery medium. No matter what I do, Windows does not want to install on the m.2 drive.

I've tried:

Checking if both drives are recognised in the BIOS (they are)
Changing my boot order in the BIOS to make sure it tries the booting from the M.2 and not the USB drive
Unplugging the USB drive, but that just takes me to the BIOS every time
Installing Windows on the Samsung SSD (the one that originally had Windows installed), but that now leads to the exact same results
Updating the BIOS firmware
Disabling Secure Boot (which wasn't actually possible, so I just removed the secure boot keys)
Disabling CSM
Running the startup repair from the recovery volume. It just said it couldn't be fixed and produced a log file saying "a recently serviced boot binary is damaged" with the 0x825 error code
Unplugging every drive except for the M.2 drive when it reboots during the installation
Following this solution