What to do if your HDD is not visible during a W10 install

I recently posted a question regarding not being able to see the HDD when I was trying to rebuild a HP laptop.

Lots of people on here were super helpful and gave me lots of advise so thank you.

My issue is this is NOT the 1st time Ive seen this happen when during the install process windows doesnt see the drive.

Last week I had an Acer laptop and I put a brand new SSD drive in it yet during the install it would NOT see the drive.

I had a spare HDD of the same brand but smaller size which previoulsy may have had an OS on it. I put this in and it worked straight away and let me build the machine. I then took a Macrium image and copied this to the brand new HDD i had previoulsy tried and it worked and the machine is using this now.

I cant do this everytime though.

So what is the root cause of this behaviour and in future how else can i resolve it?

TIA Bart

If the disk, HDD or SSD, is new, initialize it first from Windows Disk Manager.

How would I do that?
The laptop at that point Is not active?

You can create a Linux system USB flash drive, like GParted. If the Linux system USB flash drive sees the HDD or SSD, then it is a driver issue. If the Linux system USB flash drive does not see the HDD or SSD, and neither does Windows, then it is more likely a hardware issue. All of this is assuming, of course, that the drive appears in BIOS. If the drive does not appear in BIOS, you need to fix that problem first.

Thanks

1 how do I make Gparted
2 if driver issue, how do I go about finding what it is?
3 in bios am I just checking that the drive exists

How would it explain the issue I had last week as above?

1. GParted Live on USB
2. Best bet is to look at the manufacturer's website support page for your motherboard.
3. Yes, checking that BIOS recognizes the drive

No clue what caused the issue you had last week.