Acer laptop Nitro 5 An517-54-79L1 not booting, new SSD installed.
Acer laptop Nitro 5 An517-54-79L1 not booting, new SSD installed.
I've never owned a laptop that wasn't company-issued for two decades. Chose to swap in one PC for a laptop. Purchased an517-54-79l1 thinking it would work with the NVMe M.2 Samsung 970 Pro running its own OS, just like the other machine was set up. After replacing the drives, I encountered the error "Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart." The automatic fix didn't help. UEFI correctly recognized the disks. Switching back to the laptop's original drive resolved the issue and allowed booting. The 970 Pro is currently running Windows 10. Since it's not the OEM version, I can move it between systems. Placing the Samsung drives back into the desktop worked fine—it uses a Gigabyte M.2 slot. I've tried everything with just the 970 Pro and the 970 and 960 models too, plus the original 970. I'm curious if this laptop will only boot with the original drive as the boot device. What else might be causing this?
I attempted to install Windows 10 on the Samsung 970 Pro inside the Acer Nitro 5 laptop. UEFI recognizes the drive, but the installation tool doesn’t. Using DiskPart, I listed disks and only saw the original USB Windows 10 installation. When I reinstalled the Acer OEM SSD, the same issue persisted—Windows 11 boots fine, but the installer fails to detect it. The system’s UEFI is minimal, offering little control beyond boot order, secure boot toggling, and Fastboot management. This setup is unusual; anyone with experience would likely have a better idea.
Additional details: The system isn't detecting the drive from the installer since it lacks the Intel 11th Gen RAPID drivers. For the original SSD and my Samsung 970 Pro, using a Windows 10 USB installer along with another USB to run the RAPID drivers now allows the installer to recognize both drives. Just in case anyone else encounters a similar issue.