The system detects that a required media driver is absent on your computer.
The system detects that a required media driver is absent on your computer.
My setup: I have a Gigabyte B850 Gaming WIFI6 motherboard with an AMD AM5 socket, an NVMe SSD from SKHynix, and the CPU is an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X. I just started a new Windows 10 installation, but when I try to install, I see an error saying a media driver is missing. I’m using a random NVMe SSD from an Intel NUC, but I found out it doesn’t need special drivers for Windows. I downloaded all the motherboard drivers I could find—like RAID and chipset ones—and saved them on a flash drive formatted with FAT-32. I plugged that drive into a USB 2 port on the motherboard, but nothing shows up when I try to find the drivers. I noticed the files are .exe type, and some people say Windows might need .inf files too. I tried putting them in zip folders, but it didn’t help. I opened the command line and saw the drive is recognized, so I did a full format and made an NTFS partition, hoping that would fix things, but still nothing changed. Help would be super nice! I haven’t used Windows in a long time, so imagine me explaining this to a 10-year-old.
Set up Windows 11, as this device doesn’t support Windows 10, which causes the issue
I recently installed Windows 11 and found Gigabyte drivers labeled as "Preinstall drivers" for RAID. These include non-Exe files. I managed to display them in the installer by disabling the compatibility check. Still, when I tried to install any of them, the same warning appeared: "A media driver your computer needs is missing. This could be a DVD, USB, or Hard disk driver. If you have a CD, DVD, or USB flash driver with the driver on it, please insert it now."
You collected the .exe files using 7-Zip and continued extracting them further, yet Windows Setup didn't identify any of these expanded files as drivers.
You recently updated to a new SSD model and are experiencing the same issue again.
Your SATA settings are set to AHCI or RAID. AHCI doesn’t need extra drivers when installing Windows. Ensure all other drives except the boot drive are unplugged. Your NVME RAID configuration is detailed in your motherboard manual. Refer to it for instructions on enabling RAID or setting SATA mode.
Thank you for the investigation. It seems your NVMe RAID configuration was already turned off, and SATA was configured as AHCI.
Up until now, my bootable USB was made by using Fedora Media Writer on a Windows machine I didn’t own. Now I wrote the ISO file with someone else’s Windows system, and it worked smoothly. I assumed it should have been fine since the installer was running, but I suspect the difference might be related to GPT versus MBR.