Question Win11 install stuck at installing network drivers stage

[Pimpom]

I've been trying - and failing - to do a clean install of Windows 11 in my new computer. Windows 10 installed a few days ago without a hitch but I decided to go straight for 11. The hardware is

Ryzen 5 8600G
MSI Pro B650M-P
16GB 6000MHz CL30 RAM
XPG S70 Blade 1TB
XPG Pylon 550W

The installer is the 24H2 ISO recently downloaded from the MS site. The media is a multiboot USB device prepared with Ventoy.

The installation progressed normally up to the stage where it says "Let's connect you to a network" with an "Install drivers" button. There's no option to skip this step.

I clicked the Install drivers button and pointed to the chipset driver package from MSI. As the driver is an exe pack, I'd previously extracted the contents. but the Windows installer finds nothing there.

I downloaded the Realtek driver but this is also an exe pack. So I extracted the contents too. The Windows installer seems to find something here and tells me to reboot.

Rebooting takes me back to the step where I choose the country and keyboard layout, then proceeds to "Let's connect you to a network" with the "Install drivers" button. Then tells me to reboot again after seeming to find something it can use. (I tried all folders and sub-folders in the extracted driver package).

The same thing happens over and over and over again. What do I do?

 

[SkyNetRising]

I downloaded the Realtek driver but this is also an exe pack. So I extracted the contents too. The Windows installer seems to find something here and tells me to reboot.
Rebooting takes me back to the step where I choose the country and keyboard layout, then proceeds to "Let's connect you to a network" with the "Install drivers" button. Then tells me to reboot again after seeming to find something it can use. (I tried all folders and sub-folders in the extracted driver package).
The same thing happens over and over and over again. What do I do?

Network driver package is zip archive (not exe).
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/PRO-B650M-P/support#driver
Download and extract zip archive,
find folder (with 3 files: rt640x64.cat rt640x64.inf rt640x64.sys)

realtek_pcielan_10.73.815.2024\WIN10\64​

and install drivers from that location.

 

[Pimpom]

Thank you. That was really stupid of me. I plead temporary insanity from being distracted by something that happened a few days ago.

When I needed a display driver for the same computer after installing Windows 10 two days ago, I found that MSI offers a driver for Win11 but not for 10. So I used the generic driver from the AMD site. The chipset driver from MSI worked fine and Windows 10 installer didn't ask for any network driver.

So, with all that still fresh in my mind, I thought only in terms of the chipset driver and it never occurred to me to look for the LAN driver button on the MSI download page.

Thanks again.

 

[Pimpom]

Follow-up:
I was a bit naive in concentrating my efforts on installing the driver for my network device. Further reading showed that the problem is with M$ trying to force users to use a Microsoft account.

I tried various workarounds:

I tried to use the OOBE\BYPASSNRO command even though some sources said that it no longer works (my ISO build number is 26100.1. A two-day-old Tom's Hardware article says that it fails to work from 26120 onwards). What I did not expect - and what none of the sources I read mentioned - is that I could not type the command. What happened was that the \ (backslash) key always came out as a #. Real sneaky.

The option "I don't have internet" never showed up. The command ipconfig /release didn't work. Pulling out the LAN plug was not an option because it was not connected in the first place.

In the end, I used the command start ms-chx:localonly and it works.

Posting this in case it helps someone else.