[SOLVED] Installing Windows 10 onto a M.2 NVMe SSD

[throwaway890234]

I am trying to perform a clean install of Windows 10 onto a new laptop, but the Windows installer doesn't recognize the M.2 SSD (Micron 2210) that came with the laptop. I can install Ubuntu perfectly fine, but when it comes to installing Windows, the drive doesn't show up. The drive shows up in the InsydeH20 BIOS, but not in the "Where do you want to install windows" portion of the installer. Here are the list of things I've already tried:

• Installing Windows on the SSD using a different computer: It works, but when placed back into the laptop, it blue screens because of UEFI Secure boot (that I cannot disable in the bios since the option is greyed out).
• Clicking "Load driver" and loading Intel's Rapid Storage Technology drivers (f6flpy-x64.zip) and Micron's NVME SSD drivers: None of them were compatible, but I tried to load them anyway to no avail
• I would have tried disabling CSM in the BIOS but it didn't appear as an option
• Installing Windows 8.1 instead: It failed with the same issue as Windows 10's installer since they are basically identical
• Starting troubleshooting instead of installing and opening a command prompt to run all of the bootrec commands: bootrec /FixBoot said that it didn't have permissions, and diskpart didn't show the SSD as an available drive. I also tried chkdsk but it failed since (you guessed it) the drive wasn't detected

If there is anything that I haven't tried that I could try in order to get Windows 10 installed on this SSD? Thanks for any help you can provide.

 

[Colif]

what make/model laptop?

 

[throwaway890235]

It's an Acer Aspire 5 (Model No: A515-56T-77PS )
What I'm trying to do now is create a generalized image of Windows using sysprep that I can deploy to the M.2 SSD since the BIOS recognizes that it is there and can boot from it.

 

[dwd999]

Its been about 3 months since the last time I did this, but from what I remember the installer can be kind of fussy about disk partitions. Did you try creating new partitions before you started the installer? Sometimes you have to delete any previous partitions so that there's nothing on the disk and all of the space is unallocated. Then start the installer and see if it does its thing, creating whatever partitions it needs. This is another sad comment on the poor quality of some of MS's supporting apps since they seem to think that the installer will encounter only one type of disk and if yours doesn't match their expectations, the installer won't work or even tell you what's wrong.

 

[throwaway890235]

Yeah one of the first things that I did was use an Ubuntu live USB and format the M.2 to 1 large NTFS block. It didn't show up in the installer then either. If writing a generic windows image to the SSD fails, I'll try reformatting and or deleting the partitions on the SSD again to see if it works.

 

[dwd999]

I can't remember the exact sequence; I started with a Western Digital SN850 1TB m.2; a some point I think I was prompted to choose GPT for the drive or maybe it came that way. Then I think after that I just let the installer do its thing, no further manual formatting or partitioning. I would just let Ubuntu mark the drive as GPT and see if the installer is OK with doing the rest.

 

[throwaway890235]

Alright I'll try that. Thanks

 

[throwaway890235]

I can't mark this thread as solved, but what fixed it for me was going to the Acer website and downloading their NVMe driver for my specific laptop and using that instead in the Windows installation menu. It was probably one of the first things I should have tried, but that's just the way troubleshooting goes sometimes. Thanks for your guys' help

 

[Colif]

I can fix its status.

glad you worked it out