Solved inaccessible boot device - STOP CODE - after installing intel graphics drivers

"intel driver and support assistant" asked me to install "Intel® Arc™ & Iris® Xe Graphics - Windows*"on my system

this seems to have killed the windows boot information*, hence making the pc give a stopcode error inaccessible boot device

• Has anyone experienced anything similar?

Windows 11 Home 64-bit
Avast Antivirus
Gigabyte Z790 S DDR4 (U3E1) ddr4 motherboard
Intel Core i3 14100 (4 cores)
2x 16Gb ddr4 2133 RAM
KINGSTON SHFS37A240G SSD system disk (GPT)
TOSHIBA DT01ACA200 data disk (MBR)
HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH24NSD1 (DVD RW)
Intel UHD Graphics 730 graphics - Subvendor Gigabyte (1458)
Realtek Gaming 2.5GbE Family Controller

i installed the intel graphics driver "Intel® Arc™ & Iris® Xe Graphics - Windows*"
Shortly afterwards I used Aomei backupper standard to make system backup of the (SSD) system disk and disk (image) backup of both disks

After shutdown the pc did not boot with a stop code "inaccessible boot device"

• The PC (motherboard?) did not detect the AOMEI WINPE rescue CD in the optical drive
• After modifying BIOS and booting from an AOMEI WINPE rescue USB stick, i restored the backup done after installing the INTEL drivers
  • no success - stopcode inaccessible boot device both after system restore and disk image restore.
• i then restored the previous disk image** backup - done last month before the intel driver update
  • the PC then rebooted successfully

I deduce that the intel graphics driver corrupted the boot information on the system disk.

Has anyone experienced anything similar?


* i will restore the faulty system disk backup to a different partition, so maybe i can compare the contents of the efi and c partitions besides restoring new files in the user profiles since the date of the restored backup

** system backup ignores a partition on the SSD ( the partition contains "$WINRE_BACKUP_PARTITION.MARKER" ) ,
disk image backup picks up all partitions

You can uninstall the driver causing the error but the error message usally caused by corrupt BCD store.

In this video, i will show you how to uninstall offline windows operating system drivers with Dism command.

with the restore to the previous month, i do not have the updated intel driver

as the motherboard found no bootable media, Windows, DISM, etc. are not accessible -
"inaccessible boot device" means you get just a blue screen with a stopcode error

you do have to tweak BIOS to be able to boot at all from the USB stick

I would think the Intel UHD would use the graphics for the previous generation of processors: List of Drivers for Intel® Graphics not the Arc stuff.

Intel has some support forums you could check out. Intel Graphics Support Forum

Note that they do mention on their driver's page "Check with your manufacturer... there may be incompatibilities", etc. To me it really sounds like something you need to take up with Gigabyte. Display Driver code should not be down in the guts of the boot process. Sounds like overlaid code or something like that.

gigabyte has been sent the same message
let's see what they reply

gigabyte response below:

known issue!

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What Likely Happened​

Installing the Intel® Arc™ & Iris® Xe Graphics driver might sound harmless, but here's the deeper problem:

Possible Chain Reaction:​

1. Intel’s unified driver installer (from Intel Driver & Support Assistant) can bundle additional system drivers, including:
   
   • Intel VMD drivers
   • Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) storage drivers
   • Platform drivers affecting PCIe/NVMe behavior
2. If your system was in RAID mode or using VMD, the new Intel drivers may have:
   
   • Replaced or misconfigured the storage driver
   • Caused a mismatch between your boot device configuration and driver stack
3. Result: Windows can’t access the system drive → INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

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Why the Backup Restore Also Failed (Post-Driver)​

When you restored your backup made after installing the Arc driver, it still included the faulty driver or boot config, so the problem remained.

Only restoring a pre-driver backup worked — because it didn’t contain the corrupted boot configuration or mismatched drivers.



Regards

GIGABYTETeam

Well, it's good that they know. You might want to report this to Intel or post on the community board there as a public service.