Solved Win 10 Installer & Win 11 Installer detecting neither of my 2 nvme drives individually, nor a raid-0 RST array comprised of them

Long story short. I had windows 11 installed on this very same system with 2 2TB NVME drives in Raid-0 Using VMD and intel RST. I decided to switch to arch linux, and disabled RST, and instead left the two drives in their default modes. I installed arch linux on an mdadm (software) raid-0 and used this for months with no issue. I decided I wanted to dual boot this config with windows, and opted to start from scratch. I now cannot get my windows installer(s) to recognize my nvme drives. When I boot the installer and click install, I get a "Load Driver" Error that says "A media driver your computer needs is missing". I have tried installing the intel RST drivers at this point, it doesn't work. The installer doesn't detect them individually or even when I put them back into a RST Raid-0. I Can however see the drives in diskpart, and I can even get them to show up in the "browse" button's file explorer used for locating drivers if I configure them as NTFS. How can I get windows to see and install to at least 1 of these drives?

During installation, IRST drivers needs to be as *.sys, *.inf, *.cat etc.
As Intel furnish the driver as an executable, you must extract the drivers from it.

Download the driver
Intel® Rapid Storage Technology Driver Installation Software with Intel® Optane™ Memory (10th and 11th Gen Platforms)


Extract driver files from SetupRST.exe:
- Open terminal in the directory with SetupRST.exe by right-clicking the directory and selecting "Open in Terminal" or "Open PowerShell here"
- Enter the following command: "./SetupRST.exe" -extractdrivers SetupRST_extracted

The extracted drivers should be on the SetupRST_extracted folder.
Copy the folder to the Win 11 USB installation drive and load them during installation.

Megahertz said:

During installation, IRST drivers needs to be as *.sys, *.inf, *.cat etc.
As Intel furnish the driver as an executable, you must extract the drivers from it.

Download the driver
Intel® Rapid Storage Technology Driver Installation Software with Intel® Optane™ Memory (10th and 11th Gen Platforms)

Support for Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST)

Support product highlights, featured content, downloads and more for Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST)

www.intel.com

Extract driver files from SetupRST.exe:
- Open terminal in the directory with SetupRST.exe by right-clicking the directory and selecting "Open in Terminal" or "Open PowerShell here"
- Enter the following command: "./SetupRST.exe" -extractdrivers SetupRST_extracted

The extracted drivers should be on the SetupRST_extracted folder.
Copy the folder to the Win 11 USB installation drive and load them during installation.

Click to expand...

Why do I need the rst drivers? I am just trying to install windows to one of the drives in a non raid config

gabespound said:

Win 10 Installer & Win 11 Installer detecting neither of my 2 nvme drives individually, nor a raid-0 RST array comprised of them​

Click to expand...

gabespound said:

Why do I need the rst drivers? I am just trying to install windows to one of the drives in a non raid config

Click to expand...

To install Win 10 or Win 11 on some Intel MB you need to add IRST drivers, even on non RAID config (AHCI) to be able to see the target drive.
Set BIOS to AHCI and load the drivers during installation and the NVMe will show up.

Just to add, been through this on 2 computers with 2 drives, BIOS setting of AHCI/BIOS allowed Windows to automatically install as RAID 1. Downside to RAID is removal of one drive breaks the boot process.
RAID 0 = striping, doubles the capacity but loss of one drive looses everything
RAID 1 = mirroring, second drive exact copy of first drive and loss of one drive looses nothing
I have a NAS drive advertised as 8TB but has 2 x 4TB drives, set as RAID1 gives me 4TB total storage.

Fixed:

Create Windows Installation media on a USB with MBR partition table. I followed the steps on a Mac usingthis guide, but imagine if you just used the official windows media installer on a windows machine that USB stick would work.

You also will need to install the RST drivers if you are installing on NVME drives. Even if you are not using raid. Either download them from your motherboard manufacturer's website and put them on a separate USB stick, or extract them from the setupRST.exe provided by install if you search from the RST drivers. run ./setupRST.exe -extractdrivers setupRSTDrivers and the drivers will be extracted into that folder.

Then, finally, the windows installer gets confused if there are other boot partitions on the device you are installing to, so you need to remove all other boot partitions, even extra USBs (not the windows installer) from the PC before continuing. deleting/formatting them also works.

If you do all this you can install windows on a system that shares a software raid 0 array with an arch linux install.

While I'm glad the above fixes worked, you can install Windows 11 without the IRST drivers, if you can disable IRST in the BIOS. I just rebuilt my system this way last week - no issues, runs just as good as before.

ajgringo619 said:

While I'm glad the above fixes worked, you can install Windows 11 without the IRST drivers, if you can disable IRST in the BIOS. I just rebuilt my system this way last week - no issues, runs just as good as before.

Click to expand...

You definitely can, i've done it in the past. I think for some reason however, even if IRST is disabled in BIOS and the NVME drives are not being managed by VMD, if there are other boot partitions on the nvme drive you're trying to install to, or if that drive has a software raid configured on it inside a different partition, you do need the RST drivers loaded. This was the case for me