[SOLVED] New laptop, storage not detected during win10 install

[davesp]

Bought a new laptop (full specs). It has an HDD and an m.2 SSD. It came with no OS. When I try to install Windows 10, no drives show up in the windows install location selection screen. The hard drives show up in BIOS.

Here's what I tried:

1. Different boot drives.
2. Multiple Win images (tried the official Microsoft media creation tool and unofficial ISOs).
3. Checked BIOS to see if hard drives are detected there (they are).
4. Checked diskpart (only boot drive shows up).
5. Made sure HDD and SSD are both properly connected.
6. Reseat SSD.
7. Removed HDD and boot only with SSD.
8. Reset BIOS to default settings.
9. CMOS reset (unplugged laptop battery, unplugged CMOS battery, 30 second hold power, reconnect everything).
10. Plugged SSD into desktop PC. It showed up fine in disk management.
11. On same desktop:
    1. Initialized the SSD and assigned a new letter (G).
    2. Ran diskpart again, with the following commands: list disk, select disk 3 (that's the SSD), clean, create partition=primary, format quick fs=ntfs, assign letter=G.
    3. Put SSD back in laptop.

I'm stumped. Any ideas? Thanks!

Here are some images:

1. BIOS1:

   https://imgur.com/KG7mH84

   View: https://i.imgur.com/KG7mH84.jpg
2. BIOS2:

   https://imgur.com/LYkWfRe

   View: https://i.imgur.com/LYkWfRe.jpg
3. BIOS3:

   https://imgur.com/jtqEsmC

   View: https://i.imgur.com/jtqEsmC.jpg
   (note IPTT is enabled by default but I've tried installing with it disabled; also Secure Boot is disabled here but I've tried installing with it enabled as well)
4. BIOS4:

   https://imgur.com/CZChXL4

   View: https://i.imgur.com/CZChXL4.jpg
5. Laptop insides:

   https://imgur.com/g02fUco

   View: https://i.imgur.com/g02fUco.jpg

 

[davesp]

Also tried booting to a linux live session (followed this tutorial). The SSD seems to be detected there, as can be seen here:

https://imgur.com/a/ETwuZPq

View: http://imgur.com/a/ETwuZPq

 

[dwd999]

Does your linux distro include something like the gparted app? If you run gparted do the drives appear and are they marked as gpt devices?

 

[davesp]

Does your linux distro include something like the gparted app? If you run gparted do the drives appear and are they marked as gpt devices?

Thanks for the reply. Yes it does. Only the SSD appears (see image), but the partition table is msdos (so not gpt I believe). It has 2 partitions:

1. NTFS, 238.47gb
2. Unallocated, 1.34mb

Edit: Well I created a new partition table, then a new partition. Now the SSD has a single gpt partition. It still won't show during win install tho.

 

[davesp]

I was able to solve this by installing the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver (F6flpy-x64 - VMD.zip). I actually already tried this but it didn't work then because I downloaded the driver from the Lenovo product page, and it was a single exe file which Windows wasn't able to detect, so the driver wasn't installed. I downloaded the driver now from Intel and it was a whole zipped folder this time. Now windows was able to detect the drivers and installed them, and both drives are shown in the Windows install screen.

 

[USAFRet]

and both drives are shown in the Windows install screen.

For a new WIndows install, you want only ONE drive connected.
Reconnect the other one after.

 

[davesp]

For a new WIndows install, you want only ONE drive connected.
Reconnect the other one after.

Why? Seems to have gone fine.

 

[USAFRet]

Why? Seems to have gone fine.

Yes, it installed fine.

But what happens is, the boot partition often/usually ends up on the other drive.
Remove that drive, or it fails...no boot for you.

Please show us a screencap of the resulting Disk Management window.

 

[dwd999]

I forgot to ask if you had your laptop hardwired into the internet before installing. Windows encourages us to do that just in case it needs new drivers during install and I wonder if it would have automatically downloaded the IRST drivers if it was connected.