Today, I share a short post about an issue I recently faced when a customer wanted to perform a clean Windows 11 install on some HP ProBooks of different generations. The laptops where still running Windows 10 but they had a reason to perform a clean install using an image on USB. But while they wanted to install Windows on their laptops, no hard disk or partitions where shown in the Windows 11 installation wizard, although the laptop was still bootable with Windows 10.
After searching on some different fora I found that the Intel Rapid Storage driver, downloadable from the HP Support site for example, could solve the issue.
Loading this Intel RST driver, for example from a second USB drive, should fix the issue.
After downloading the executable from the HP website, run it so it is extracted to your USB key.
And voila, indeed, the partitions showed up again! Well that was an easy fix.
Windows 11 was installed fine, without any issues. But when the installation was finished and the laptop rebooted, a new error was shown. No bootable media was found!
How is that possible!?
I scratched my head a couple of time and started digging in the BIOS configuration of the laptops with these issue.
After some time I wondered if the setting Configure storage controller for VMD (or on another generation laptop, Configure storage controller for Intel Optane), should be turned on or off.
I compared the setting with a laptop which didn’t had these issues and noticed the setting was turned off.
After switching this settings to off and a reboot, the laptop started with a freshly installed Windows 11 version.
After this, we also turned off the settings on some more laptop and tried to install Windows 11 from USB, but it turned that didn’t work.
We first needed to load the Intel RST driver during the Windows installation wizard and install Windows 11. And after that, we needed to switch off the Storage Controller setting in the BIOS.
That’s it for this post. I hope this will save you some time in case you’re facing the same issues with partitions not showing up.
