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December 15th, 2022 06:00
XPS 9305 Windows 11 Reinstall Can't Find Internal SSD
XPS 13 9305
My XPS 13 9305 came with Windows 11 pre-installed. I needed Linux at the time, so I installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (changing the BIOS setting from RAID to AHCI) and then migrated to Fedora 36 and recently upgraded to 37. For what it's worth, those operating systems worked spectacularly on this machine.
I now have a different use case and want to reinstall Windows 11, but the install can't detect the internal SSD. The BIOS sees the installed Samsung PM991A 512GB SSD, as does the live ISO of Fedora 37 (even in RAID mode). I downloaded the Windows 11 all-in-one driver pack from Dell that includes the Windows 10 VMD drivers. The Win11 installer stops with the error "A media driver your computer needs is missing. This could be a DVD, USB, or Hard disk driver..." When selecting the VMD drivers, the installer "spins" for a bit, then says that no new devices were found. I then proceeded to try every available storage driver in the pack to no avail.I also tried the same procedure with a Win10 ISO with the same result. I also tried switching the BIOS settings back and forth between RAID and AHCI several times with the same result in both Win10 and Win11.
The BIOS is currently on version 1.10.0. I've mined Google and been through every "Windows installer F6" tutorial. I also tried to download the Dell Recovery Image, but apparently you're only entitled to those if you're under current support (for shame, Dell).
Any ideas? I'm fairly competent, so feel free to suggest some advanced stuff. And thank you for your time.
whirlyNerd
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December 2nd, 2023 20:59
Figured this out on my desktop, but I assume the same will work for similar Dell laptops. Basically, you have to have a SupportAssist image to load Windows onto a hard drive. So you can either use the one installed from the factory or download one using the instructions here.
Hope this helps someone else!
JOcean
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December 15th, 2022 07:00
Try using a different USB port with the USB flash drive. Also this YouTube video may help as may this one. The second link describes using the Intel Rapid Storage Drive driver.
whirlyNerd
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December 15th, 2022 09:00
Thank you for taking the time to reply, JOcean. Unfortunately, this didn't work. I tried every combination of drives in ports I could think of to make sure I covered my bases... no joy.
Your response also got me thinking that maybe the USB3 hub that I was using to connect a second USB2 drive might be interfering. I don't have a second USB3 drive, so that got me thinking that I hadn't tried using the microSD slot. I burned the Win11 ISO to a microSD card using the original USB3 drive to load the RST drivers with the same results.
Additional thought: the Linux-based OSes I had previously installed used LVFS to keep the firmware up-to-date. Is it possible the RST firmware was updated and is incompatible with Windows? I did poke at this possibility a bit, but fwupdmgr didn't find any storage devices as compatible hardware, so I assume it never touched those devices.