I'm really losing it over this issue. I have an Acer Nitro 5 (AN518-58) and tried connecting it to an external monitor using USB-C DisplayPort. While messing around in the BIOS, I switched the GPU mode from Hybrid to Optimus, which turned out to be a huge mistake. Now my laptop is stuck in a recovery loop and won't boot into Windows 11. I've switched the GPU mode back to Hybrid, but that hasn't fixed the issue.
To make matters worse, neither diskpart nor wmic can find any drives, including my two internal NVMe SSDs. I've also run all the bootrec commands—fixmbr, fixboot, scanos, and rebuildbcd—but they all tell me there are no Windows installations found. I did a full BIOS reset to defaults and disabled Fast Boot, but no change.
I read somewhere that Windows RE might not have NVMe drivers, which is why diskpart can't see the drives, and I tried using drvload to load stornvme.inf but encountered error 0x80070002. Now I'm thinking of creating a bootable Windows USB on another PC and installing Windows on my second NVMe drive, which only has games—hoping the installer will recognize the drives properly.
Has anyone experienced something similar? Any other suggestions before I resort to a fresh install?
2 Answers
I totally get where you're coming from—I've seen this happen with laptops too. Sounds like it might be a drive management issue. Sometimes the BIOS settings get switched to something like RAID instead of the regular setup, making the drives invisible. Check your BIOS settings and see if it's set to VMD; if it is, switch it to AHCI. That could solve the problem because the BIOS needs to recognize the drives based on the correct management setting. Just a heads-up though, if the drives aren't being detected at all, you might not be able to install a new OS until you fix that issue.
Man, that sounds frustrating! If you’re not seeing any storage management options in the BIOS and the usual tricks aren't working, flashing Windows via USB might be your best bet. Also, if you're comfortable with it, resetting the CMOS could help reset everything to factory settings, which sometimes fixes weird BIOS issues. Just be cautious with those BIOS settings—things can get tricky fast!
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