I installed Linux Mint from a USB drive and erased both of my SSDs during setup. Now I want to reinstall Windows 11. I downloaded a Windows 11 ISO and flashed it to a USB drive with Etcher. The installer starts, but it asks for storage drivers before it will show my drives. In the command prompt, I used "list disk" and confirmed that the SSDs are detected. I have also seen errors saying that a required media driver is missing and that the boot configuration data is missing or corrupted. I tried downloading drivers for my motherboard, but I may not have prepared or loaded them correctly. My hardware is an Intel Core i7-13700KF, ASRock B660 Pro motherboard, and GeForce RTX 4060. What is the correct way to create the installer and configure the BIOS so I can perform a clean Windows 11 installation?
3 Answers
Check the motherboard firmware settings before trying again. If RAID or Intel storage remapping is enabled and you are not using a RAID array, disable it or switch the storage mode to the standard AHCI setting. Then recreate the installer with Microsoft's tool and boot from the newly prepared USB. The BCD error is usually related to the boot media or missing boot partitions, rather than requiring random motherboard drivers.
The safest approach is to use Microsoft's official Windows Media Creation Tool to make the installation USB, then perform a clean install. Since the SSDs were already erased, select the unallocated space during setup and allow Windows to create the required partitions automatically. Make sure anything important is backed up first, because deleting or formatting partitions is destructive.
Recreate the installer using Rufus on your other Windows computer instead of Etcher. Format the USB drive, select the Windows 11 ISO in Rufus, let it create the bootable media, and then boot the target PC from that USB again. This often fixes the missing media-driver message when the original USB was created incorrectly.
I do have another Windows computer. So I should format the USB, use Rufus to write the Windows ISO to it, and then boot the Linux PC from that USB for a normal installation?