Cannot Install 23H2 - Missing Media Driver?

Hi all, i can't start windows installation. My 23H2 iso was downloaded at Microsoft, and i used Rufus 4.5 to generate my bootable usb.
At the part where i'm supposed to choose a drive to install to, i get a message saying "A media driver on your computer is missing..." or something like that. I have installed windows on this same pc before but never encountered this. what is the problem and what should i do, please?

Thanks in advance.

Magnus7 said:

Hi all, i can't start windows installation. My 23H2 iso was downloaded at Microsoft, and i used Rufus 4.5 to generate my bootable usb.
At the part where i'm supposed to choose a drive to install to, i get a message saying "A media driver on your computer is missing..." or something like that. I have installed windows on this same pc before but never encountered this. what is the problem and what should i do, please?

Thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

<------

In the Taskbar search box, type: winver
Post the full build number, please.

Like... 22621.xxxx



If it's 22621.2506 or higher, then you can just use the Enablement Package to upgrade to 23H2

Also post screenshot of the error message.

To post a screenshot on this forum...​

1. Take the screenshot, (or camera pic), edit it as desired, save to your desktop as .png or .jpg (max. size = 2MB)
2. Left click in your post, where you want to place the screenshot.
3. Click the Attach Files button at lower left, browse to your pic and click Insert.
4. After clicking Insert, I usually choose the Thumbnail (smaller) option, or there is a Full Image (larger) option.

If the "new" PrtSc key function is not to your liking... here is how to set it back to it's classic function...

Magnus7 said:

At the part where i'm supposed to choose a drive to install to, i get a message saying "A media driver on your computer is missing..." or something like that

Click to expand...

Are you sure it says media driver and not "storage" driver? If it does not detect your drive during windows install, it's the storage driver that's missing. Since you do not list your system specs in your forum profile, I can only surmise it is requiring you to insert the Intel Rapid Storage (IRST) driver during the load driver step. (If you have AMD, AMD has its own RAID driver)
See this tutorial STEP # 10 Clean Install Windows 11 Tutorial
An alternative to installing the IRST raid driver is to go into bios and change disk mode from RAID to AHCI. Start the install again and it will continue using the default MS storage controller driver instead of Intel IRST. There is no lack of performance using this driver.

I'm highly interested in this topic because this an error I am seeing a lot lately, however, it is exclusively on 24H2 after having added updates to the image. I too want to see that build number, as I may have some suggestions depending upon what build this is.

If it really is 23H2 then the approach will be radically different.

Hi Ghot, thanks for reply. You mean on the junk disk where i had win 11 already installed? the winver is 22621.1702.
I see what you mean about the upgrade, but my purpose is to do a clean install on another disk. Actually 23H2 or 22H2 makes little difference to me, i found 22H2 quite stable for me.

Hi Freebooter & Glasskutter yes pretty sure it said 'Media Drivers' but please note, just less than a week ago (maybe 4-5 days), i actually did install that 22621.1702 successfully without this problem. i was using a 22H2 iso usb which i prepared a year ago on a different pc. if i attempt it again,later, i wil take a screenie for the 2 of you.

I think you are right about the AMD settings, but i never changed sata operation in BIOS from RAID to ahci or vice versa. it's just an R5 5500. How come it didn't ask me about drivers few days ago? this is where i would choose the disk to install to.

yeah, i think it might be the IRST drivers, but i'm only winraiding lol or rather just combining dynamic disks not even really bios or hardware raiding... wtf

It's like this : a few days ago, my pc had completely no OS. i got to that screen and i selected my secondary drive, a 1tb ssd as a temporary test windows 11 drive. no i'm not interested in dual boot, i was going to delete it later. i wasn't testing windows, i wanted to test some components of my machine and i needed some win environment. Windows installation went ok and at desktop i merged my other 3 x ssd drives in dynamic stripe. these are just usage drives, i copied in some loose data that's all.. after that i went into disk management and i reformatted 1 nvme drive and went into diskpart to break all partitions etc. actually i guess i didn't have to do it manually, because this was my intended primary system drive and i could do it in setup but i'm a bit ocd so i did it in dos. during this entire process i was offline.

And i powered down, and stuck in a usb stick again (another stick which i prepared on second pc with 23H2 iso) but this time at setup, i got stopped at the part where i would choose my disk, with the message i described in post topic. Following that i even tried using the same 22H2 stick i used few days ago (which worked that time)...but strangely.. now it doesn't!

Any ideas? bios recognizes all my disks and hardware. i used rufus to make all my setup usbs in the past and never encountered this problem before. the other pc i mentioned is a very old and frankenstein H61, which sadly at this point in writing, had just been dismantled.

ps. under Boot Options in bios i tried both UEFI and UEFI/Legacy hybrid, both gave same results. UEFI was my default option.

pps. wait glasscutter, maybe i dont have to attempt it again to get you the exact error message, cos before i posted, i searched and saw people had the exact message. let me look for it and i wil paste it here for u.

ppps. Got it. here people, same message as this guy here on tube

(maybe that's why it didnt happen first time - i haven't combined my disks yet that day..., i will find a solution, but right now i dumped 900gb of data into those drives couldn't break them, let me move out the data and i will try break them).

Try Solution 2 (Resolving 'A media driver is missing' error during Windows 10/11 clean install)

Start the process. Once the error shows, click cancel and move the usb drive to a different port and try to click install again

Hello Dracone, i found a very simple workaround to this which works 100% of the time for me, at least for 22H2, i did not try 23H2 iso. installing irst or any other driver just to overcome this, at this stage in installation is to my opinion, just not acceptable. thanks to you; i got the idea from the Method 2 for win 10 as you pointed out. actually my workaround is a variant of it. it's not required to choose a different USB port; as long as u pull it out and replug it, at a specific screen, it works :-

1. you know the purple page where you get to choose English (World) [i think by now the whole world is doing this to reduce bloat]? Well, go on choose English (World) and click NEXT.
2. The next purple page is the INSTALL NOW page, with a rectangular INSTALL NOW button in the center of the screen, and something like REPAIR YOUR COMPUTER on your lower left corner. Don't click install yet, here is where you must do this trick.
3. unplug ur USB installer, and replug it. i varied the timing for this several times, sometimes with a longer interval in between and i also replugged it immediately- there is no difference, as long as u unplu/replug, you're ok. Doesn't matter which port.
4. Click INSTALL NOW - you bypass the error message and now get to the windows serial page etc...

ps. i also tested, it had nothing to do with having a dynamic striped array somewhere on ur pc.