Solved X570 AMD Windows 11 Clean Install - NVME Not Recognized

I decided it was time to clean up the PC and reinstall Windows. It's been a couple of years, and a couple of software packages were messed up.

I erased the boot drive with Samsung Secure Erase, and then I created a bootable USB stick using the media creation tool on an Intel laptop.

Boot is set to UEFI. No other drives in the system. CSM disabled (AHCI)

Windows will boot off the USB stick, but when it can't find a drive to install to, and asks me to install media drivers. However, if I shift-f10 and open up a command prompt, diskpart sees the drive just fine. I've tried a lot of things:
1. Switched Secure Mode boot on and off - no difference.
2. Tried installing AMD RAID drivers from the gigabyte website, even though it's an MSI mother board. Unfortunately, the MSI drivers are simply an installer that only runs on the target machine after Windows is installed. That seems kind of messed up - base drivers should be old school INF installs, right? Just for this kind of issue? This got me by the screen asking for device drivers, but as soon as it needed to copy files, it couldn't find the drive.
3. Tried forcing the partition to gpt with diskpart. no difference.

I have chased down dozens of threads reporting similar problems, and no one seems to have a working solution. One of the threads said to ask here. So here I am....

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Go into uefi bios advanced settings, and change disk mode to AHCI. Save the settings. Do your clean install again. Windows installation should recognize your disks using the Microsoft storge controller driver.

Thank you for the quick reply!

The disk mode is set to AHCI. Other people reporting similar behavior on Intel motherboards have solved the issue by installing the Intel RST drivers which they said was possible by running the RST installer on a different computer with flag to extract the drivers. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find anything similar for AMD chipset drivers (one would think that chipset drivers should be installable as part of the install process?)

Any other suggestions?

Have you tried this secure erase option from right in the BIOS, seemed to work for this guy and quite a few others on an MSI X570 board.

I also read some posts of people disabling the Intel Rapid Storage Technology option in the BIOS and then they managed to get it installed.

also make sure that your drive is set with a GPT partition. You can do so during the Windows install, by doing.

1. Press Shift + F10 at the setup screen to open Command Prompt.
2. Type mbr2gpt /convert /allowFullOS and press Enter.

I think this is a common problem with some types of Samsung SSDs which don´t work with the standard Windows driver, but need a special Samsung one.

Go to the Samsung support site and download the driver for the particular SSD you have installed. Copy the driver to a UFD and install from it when the installer ask for the driver. .

I think I've solved the problem. I had to find an old version of the AMD chipset drivers that had an embedded .MSI file for driver installation. I extracted that from the container exe using 7zip. I then extracted the cab from the MSI file using 7z, and found the folder with all the drivers. Copied that to a USB stick, and picked the first one that showed up when I used the installer to browse for drivers.

Now just to work around the online account requirement....

Lot of stuff here when the solution to why disks can't be seen during a clean install is clearly laid out in step 10 of the clean install tutorial. Clean Install Windows 11
"In this situation, you could either disable RAID in BIOS/UEFI or select to "Add driver" to install the RAID driver from your OEM/motherboard manufacturer's chipset."

Disabling RAID is changing disk mode to AHCI. Unless one uses RAID or has a drive that won't work with the MS storage controller driver, it's by and far the easiest solution.

Anibor_11 said:

I think this is a common problem with some types of Samsung SSDs which don´t work with the standard Windows driver, but need a special Samsung one.

Go to the Samsung support site and download the driver for the particular SSD you have installed. Copy the driver to a UFD and install from it when the installer ask for the driver. .

Click to expand...

There were Samsung drives that needed Samsung drivers.

It appears that the 980 isn't one of those.