Windows missing driver conundrum

bzimm41 said:

IDE is not an option.

Try raid.

If they are options, disable Legacy USB and/or Legacy BIOS.

SATA should be AHCI for this test.

steve108 said:

Try raid.

Probably best to keep things the way they work for Linux. AHCI should work for Windows.

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steve108 said:

Probably best to keep things the way they work for Linux. AHCI should work for Windows.

@bzimm41,
I'm wondering now if you try installing with BIOS in raid mode and it works, you'll learn something. You should be able to switch the BIOS back to AHCI mode if that's the mode Linux boot in.

I have a fairly new laptop that for whatever reason was in raid mode with Windows 10. I was recently able to switch it to AHCI mode.

@steve108
Switching to raid mode didn't produce any different results. In fact, I'm not sure the setting stayed in raid as I don't have two discs to be able to use raid; in any event when I went to switch it back it was back in AHCI mode.

Long and short of it is that I gave up in frustration and just installed Linux as the only OS. I'll have to figure something else out for work, which probably involves dragging an ancient laptop home

I really appreciate the time that you all took out of your day to try and help me resolve this issue. Maybe when the frustration level dies down a bit I'll give it another try. Thank you again and you all have a great day.

@bzimm41, thanks for the update. The old laptop I had showed RAID in BIOS, but since it had only one drive, that translated to it working in IDE mode until I changed the BIOS to AHCI mode and jumped through some hoops to make the AHCI windows driver install.

OK, this is an old post but just to put this thread to bed . . .

I just recently attempted to install Windows 10 again on this computer that has been running Linux for the since November. I found an old Seagate HDD and got my old Windows 8 DVD to install to that disk. Updating to Windows 10 took a while (ah the good old 7200 rpm HDD days ) so I began looking at moving the install to the NVMe drive but couldn't make a clone work. In the end I wound up blowing out all the partitions on the NVMe drive and installed Windows 10 from a USB drive. And it worked!

So what made the difference between frustration and success? I don't really know. During one of the steps of attempting to clone the C: drive I changed the drive from MBR to GPT and that may have done it. No other settings in the BIOS/UEFI were changed so it was probably the GPT thing. Dumb luck saves the day I guess.

The most common problem is that the sticks created on Linux or MacOS are faulty.

This is because when you download an ISO from the Microsoft site, this ISO has an Install.wim in it.

The Install.wim is over 4 GB in size and is therefore not Fat32 compatible.

If you then use tools such as balenaEtcher to create a stick that is formatted as Fat32, the installation medium is damaged.

On Linux created media it is usually the error with the missing drivers and on MacOS it can lead to the error code: 0x8007000D - Error invalid data.

So what could you: Download an ISO that contains an install.esd instead of an install.wim or, for example, if it is a fairly new computer on which Windows is to be installed, to format the stick with Nfts.

What many do not know is that modern UEFI versions have Ntfs support and can also boot from NTFS formatted sticks.

On 2 of my computers it works without any problems with Ntfs.

hth

Friendly greetings
Sorry for any mistakes. English is not my native language.

There is a Linux utility woeusb for creating from within Linux a windows installer boot stick. This utility knows how to deal with a large .wim: WoeUSB .

There is also a re-implementation WoeUSB-ng. This is a rewrite of original WoeUSB.