Win 10 Installer & Win 11 Installer detecting neither of my 2 nvme drives individually, nor a raid-0 RST array comprised of them

gbspound · April 24

Long story short. I had windows 11 installed on this very same system with 2 2TB NVME drives in Raid-0 Using VMD and intel RST.

I decided to switch to arch linux, and disabled RST, and instead left the two drives in their default modes. I installed arch linux on an mdadm (software) raid-0 and used this for months with no issue. I decided I wanted to dual boot this config with windows, and opted to start from scratch.

I now cannot get my windows installer(s) to recognize my nvme drives. When I boot the installer and click install, I get a "Load Driver" Error that says "A media driver your computer needs is missing". I have tried installing the intel RST drivers at this point, it doesn't work. The installer doesn't detect them individually or even when I put them back into a RST Raid-0. I Can however see the drives in diskpart, and I can even get them to show up in the "browse" button's file explorer used for locating drivers if I configure them as NTFS.

How can I get windows to see and install to at least 1 of these drives?

gbspound · April 26

Fixed:

Create Windows Installation media on a USB with MBR partition table. I followed the steps on a Mac using this guide, but imagine if you just used the official windows media installer on a windows machine that USB stick would work.

You also will need to install the RST drivers if you are installing on NVME drives. Even if you are not using raid. Either download them from your motherboard manufacturer's website and put them on a separate USB stick, or extract them from the setupRST.exe provided by install if you search from the RST drivers. run ./setupRST.exe -extractdrivers setupRSTDrivers and the drivers will be extracted into that folder.

Then, finally, the windows installer gets confused if there are other boot partitions on the device you are installing to, so you need to remove all other boot partitions, even extra USBs (not the windows installer) from the PC before continuing. deleting/formatting them also works.

If you do all this you can install windows on a system that shares a software raid 0 array with an arch linux install.