A Clean Windows Install Has Never Done Anything Like This To Me Before...

We've all been there...you get a new PC and give your old laptop to a loved one. And I've done several fresh installs of Windows over the years, and have read many support forums to assist me to get it done. So I figured this time wouldn't be any different--boy was I wrong. I'll try to explain in full what happened, what's happening now, and maybe someone smarter than I will have a solution.

So, when I first used the Media Creation Tool (gonna call it MCT from this point), I was asked if I wanted to do a fresh install or if I wanted to save my files and such. I kept attempting to proceed and I kept getting a message that I couldn't due to some sort of partition error...I honestly can't recall the error in full--this was two weeks ago and I didn't take pictures, sadly. In any case, at the time I didn't see any harm in attempting to format both of the SSD's, aaaaand I believe that's where the real problems began. After I erased both drives and then tried to use the MCT, it would tell me that I needed to use Windows Recovery, which I tried to utilize, but then it would state that it couldn't be repaired and would loop back to the same screen...
But something weird happened after I went to the BIOS screen and hit exit--Windows actually started installing! So I let it do it's thing, figuring my problems were over. Sadly, during the several restarts, it would go back to the recovery screen every time it restarted during installation, as well as a whole new screen...it's asking *which* OS I want to choose...Windows 11 or Windows 11. *Sigh*
This didn't seem to have an effect on the installation itself, but I would have (and continue) to boot out of the BIOS due to every time the PC is powered on, it now loads right into the recovery menu. I then need to enter the BIOS screen, exit without saving, pick which version of Windows (I've only ever chosen volume 2) and then everything seems to work fine. Windows runs, updates and everything. That said...it installed on the SATA SSD, and not the NVMe drive like I was expecting it to.

Now if I need to, I have zero issue doing another fresh install, but I have to admit I'm a little gun-shy after what just happened, not to mention that maybe there's an easier way out of this mess that I've created, which brings me here. I hope I've provided enough detail to my problem, and hope that a solution exists! Thanks for reading!

In this video, i will guide you on how to fix "A Required Device Isn't Connected or Can't Be Accessed" error on Windows.

Thank you for the fast response, and the great video! However--things didn't go quite the same for me. The automatic repair (of course) doesn't work, so I went with the command prompt options and, while some things were repaired when it scanned, it didn't resolve my issue. I was also denied access with the /fixboot command.

And my /diskpart options are different than those in the video, and I'm unsure which of these I should choose, or even if it would help my issue if I did select one...

Again, thanks for the help!

You don't need to make the disk active, as Windows 11 uses GPT disk.

You can recreate BCD store file, here's how to video.


For repairing bootrec /fixboot command execute below commands

You have an UEFI system!
The right command :
bcdboot c:\windows /s s: /f UEFI

The whole situation sounds to me like you never booted the computer from the USB flash drive.