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Windows 11 installation issues when the drive isn't recognized despite driver injection.

Windows 11 installation issues when the drive isn't recognized despite driver injection.

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Alexty123
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01-30-2021, 09:40 PM
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Working on creating a universal Windows 11 installer to reinstall on many recent Dell laptops of the same model. The machines are set up from the factory with RAID in BIOS, even though they only have one drive. We usually need to revert to AHCI in BIOS, but at this scale it becomes time-consuming. To fix this, I tried adding the Intel RST driver for RAID into the install USB so it could handle this automatically. I did this by: obtaining the newest driver from Dell for this model and extracting it, mounting the boot.wim file on the USB using DISM, adding the driver via DISM, and committing the changes. The issue remains I can't get the Windows installer to recognize the drive even after installing the drivers. I placed the same driver in another USB drive and loaded it manually at the Windows 11 installation screen, which worked perfectly, so I'm confident the drivers are correct. However, I still don't understand why the Windows PE environment doesn't load the driver or hasn't installed it properly. To troubleshoot, I've tried: using different driver versions (an outdated one from Dell's full pack and the latest from their site), loading all drivers from the Intel RST Driver extraction to boot.wim using DISM (iaStorHsaComponent.inf, iaStorHsa_Ext.inf, iaStorVD.inf), and using the driver that was manually loaded from the installer (iaStorVD.inf). This was done with DISM after creating a clean copy of the original boot.wim file. I'm concerned about using DISM commands but would prefer to avoid them if possible. Could you suggest what might be going wrong? It would save us time by eliminating the need to adjust BIOS settings and avoiding manual driver installs each time. Unattend.XML DISM commands might help, but I'd rather leave that option if it's even feasible.
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Alexty123
01-30-2021, 09:40 PM #1

Working on creating a universal Windows 11 installer to reinstall on many recent Dell laptops of the same model. The machines are set up from the factory with RAID in BIOS, even though they only have one drive. We usually need to revert to AHCI in BIOS, but at this scale it becomes time-consuming. To fix this, I tried adding the Intel RST driver for RAID into the install USB so it could handle this automatically. I did this by: obtaining the newest driver from Dell for this model and extracting it, mounting the boot.wim file on the USB using DISM, adding the driver via DISM, and committing the changes. The issue remains I can't get the Windows installer to recognize the drive even after installing the drivers. I placed the same driver in another USB drive and loaded it manually at the Windows 11 installation screen, which worked perfectly, so I'm confident the drivers are correct. However, I still don't understand why the Windows PE environment doesn't load the driver or hasn't installed it properly. To troubleshoot, I've tried: using different driver versions (an outdated one from Dell's full pack and the latest from their site), loading all drivers from the Intel RST Driver extraction to boot.wim using DISM (iaStorHsaComponent.inf, iaStorHsa_Ext.inf, iaStorVD.inf), and using the driver that was manually loaded from the installer (iaStorVD.inf). This was done with DISM after creating a clean copy of the original boot.wim file. I'm concerned about using DISM commands but would prefer to avoid them if possible. Could you suggest what might be going wrong? It would save us time by eliminating the need to adjust BIOS settings and avoiding manual driver installs each time. Unattend.XML DISM commands might help, but I'd rather leave that option if it's even feasible.

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