I'm trying to do a clean reinstall of Windows 11 from a USB bootable drive because my current installation is corrupted. The problem is, while the installer loads without a hitch, my SSD isn't appearing on the partition selection screen.
I can't access my PC normally, I can only get into the BIOS, and booting from USB is hit or miss. My system specs include an MSI PRO B650M-B motherboard, an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X processor, 32GB of RAM, and a Silicon Power UD85 2TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD. The SSD is recognized in the BIOS, and I've reseated it without issue. The BIOS NVMe Self-Test also came back with no errors.
My BIOS settings are set to UEFI with AHCI enabled and Secure Boot disabled. The issues I'm facing are:
- The SSD is invisible to the Windows installer
- Diskpart only shows the USB drive
- The USB was created on a Mac using a method I found online.
I've already tried using Windows recovery mode, replacing the CMOS battery, and reseating the SSD. Do you think this is due to a missing NVMe driver in the installer, or could it be something else?
3 Answers
I highly doubt that a Windows 11 installer wouldn't include at least some generic drivers for this kind of hardware. Since your BIOS detects the SSD but the Windows installer doesn't, it's possible that the drive itself is faulty. You might want to try repartitioning the drive or even testing with another drive if you have one available. Just a heads up—repartitioning will erase data on the current drive.
Just out of curiosity, how did you create the USB installer? Was it made on Windows or on macOS/Linux?
It was created from MacOS. The USB successfully booted into the installation menu, so I thought it was fine, but maybe that’s an issue too?
Since your SSD shows up in BIOS, there’s no need to keep reseating it. Your settings seem fine. I recommend trying a different bootable USB setup. Create it on a Windows machine using Rufus, and make sure you're using the latest installation files from Microsoft. That might solve the issue.
Thank you, I'll give this a try.