I'm having a really frustrating issue with my Acer Nitro 5 (AN518-58) laptop. I tried connecting it to an external monitor through USB-C DisplayPort and made a change in the BIOS, switching the GPU mode from Hybrid to Optimus. That turned out to be a mistake because now my laptop is stuck in a recovery loop and won't boot into Windows 11 at all. I reverted the GPU setting back to Hybrid, but the problem persists. The worst part is that when I check for drives using diskpart or wmic, it shows no disks detected—not even the two internal NVMe SSDs! I attempted several bootrec commands, but all told me there are 0 Windows installations detected. I've gone ahead and reset the BIOS to default settings and disabled Fast Boot, but nothing seems to work. I came across a claim that Windows Recovery Environment doesn't come with NVMe drivers, preventing diskpart from seeing the NVMe drives. I tried loading the stornvme.inf driver, but I got error code 0x80070002. I'm planning to create a bootable Windows USB on another computer to install Windows on my second NVMe SSD, which only has games on it, hoping the installer will recognize the drives. Has anyone else faced this issue? What should I try before going for a fresh install?
2 Answers
I've dealt with this kind of situation before! It sounds like your BIOS might have switched to a different drive management setting. My friend's laptop ended up in a similar spot because it accidentally changed to RAID instead of the standard AHCI mode. If your BIOS has options for storage management, check if it's set to VMD and switch it to AHCI. If the drives aren’t recognized, you won't be able to install a new OS regardless, so that fresh install plan may not work without getting the drives visible first!
You're on the right track with creating a bootable Windows USB, but if you can't see any drives in the BIOS, that could be a bigger issue. Have you tried resetting the CMOS? Sometimes that can help sort out strange BIOS behaviors. Also, my BIOS didn’t have direct storage management options either, but I found some settings under advanced configurations. Keep poking around there just in case!
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