Solved Windows 10 or 11 flash drives made with Rufus don’t have hard disk drivers anymore?

Fresh Windows 10 22H2 and Windows 11 22H2 or 23H2 ISOs downloaded directly from Microsoft. I’m using the latest version of Rufus.

Whenever I try installing now with any drive I make, I get an F6 driver window. Very difficult to find the right drivers.

On a HP Pavilion laptop from 2013-2015, Windows 10 22H2 came up with that window. But when I installed using a DVD of W10 2004, it installed perfectly and then I upgraded to 22H2.

I’ve seen it happen with Windows 11 as well.

I’m figuring most of the regulars here are visiting the Windows 11 forum more than they’re visiting the Windows 10 forum.

Completely at a loss here. Thank you for any help.

I may be misunderstanding what you are asking, but I think it's that when trying to install windows, the install process does not see the drive that you want to install windows on. If that it correct, it's because your system is set up with RAID which does require f6 (Intel Rapid Storage Controller) drivers to be installed at the "load drivers" step of the installation process. You can have these drivers on external media and select "load drivers" pointing the install to the usb drive. Note: If you have Intel Optane Memory module installed you have to use IRST drivers. It's here in step 10 of the Clean Install tutorial.
I don't know if Brink included this step in the Windows 10 tutorial or not.
EDIT: Yes he did. See my next post
A better solution for most people that have no need of RAID or don't use Intel Optane is to enter UEFI bios and change the disk mode to AHCI rather than RAID. Save change and reboot. Start the install process again and your disks will be recognized using Microsoft's default storage controller drivers.

I run all my Intel systems this way. Performance is not affected at all. I ran extensive tests using both IRST driivers and Microsoft's storage controller driver.

I checked. and yes Brink did mention installing pre-boot storage controller drivers in step 14 here. It was not elaborated on as much as is in the tutorial for 11.

I already know about Optane and RAID needing RST/F6 drivers.

And that’s the crazy thing; there certainly wasn’t a setting on this current machine for RAID. This particular laptop came with a standard one terabyte spinning hard drive.

The other question is why did the 2004 version work and the 22H2 version did not.

On an earlier Dell laptop that came with Windows 7 originally installed I finally had to install Windows 7, which found the hard disk drivers and then it could install Windows 10 just fine.

When I get home, I will fire that machine up again and see which drivers were installed.

Disk.sys, ehstorclass.sys, hodskflt.sys, partmgr.sys.

Intel RST isn’t installed, although i can see entries in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services for iastorAVC and iastorV.

Control Panel>Device Manager>expand Storage Controllers

sgtaylor5 said:

Fresh Windows 10 22H2 and Windows 11 22H2 or 23H2 ISOs downloaded directly from Microsoft. I’m using the latest version of Rufus.

Whenever I try installing now with any drive I make, I get an F6 driver window. Very difficult to find the right drivers.

On a HP Pavilion laptop from 2013-2015, Windows 10 22H2 came up with that window. But when I installed using a DVD of W10 2004, it installed perfectly and then I upgraded to 22H2.

I’ve seen it happen with Windows 11 as well.

I’m figuring most of the regulars here are visiting the Windows 11 forum more than they’re visiting the Windows 10 forum.

Completely at a loss here. Thank you for any help.

Click to expand...

An upgrade already has the necessary drivers from the earlier Windows version. A clean installation needs the drivers, unless you switch from RAID to AHCI as suggested.

I finally figured out what the problem is; I had to make a new flash drive. The weird thing is it took four or five tries before I finally made a good one today.

Thank you all.