SOLVED: Acer Aspire 5 laptop hard disk not detected at boot. Can’t see SSD during Windows 11 install

Fix Acer Aspire 5 laptop hard disk not visible by injecting Intel storage drivers into the Windows boot image and manually loading the drivers during Windows setup.

Problem: Acer Aspire 5 laptop hard drive not detected during Windows 11 installation

The SSD is not detected and Windows setup you will ask you to load a media driver

Solution: Load Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) drivers during Windows setup

To fix this problem, we'll need to download the Intel storage drivers and add them to the Windows installer boot image boot.wim so they are available during Windows 11 setup.

1. Download Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) Driver

https://www.acer.com/us-en/support/drivers-and-manuals

Extract the download driver.zip file 

2. Get Windows version image index number using DISM

Before we can modify the Windows boot image, we need to find the index number using DISM.exe

F: is the drive letter on the Windows 11 installation USB drive

Dism /Get-ImageInfo /imagefile:F:\sources\boot.wim

In this example, Windows Setup is Index number 2

3. Mount the Windows install image using DISM

F: drive is Windows installer USB drive

Create directory C:\Mount
mkdir C:\Mount 

Mount boot.wim image
DISM /Mount-image /index:2 /imagefile:F:\sources\boot.wim /MountDir:C:\Mount

4. Copy Intel storage drivers to mounted image folder

Create folder in the mounted directory C:\Mount\Drivers
Copy the contents of the IRST driver folder to C:\Mount\Drivers

5. Save the changes and unmount the image

When you unmount the image, you must specify either /Commit to write changes to the image or /Discard to not save any changes.

# Unmount image and save changes
Dism /Unmount-image /MountDir:C:\Mount /Commit

# Unmount image, dont save changes
Dism /Unmount-image /MountDir:C:\Mount /Discard

DISM Error: 0xc142011d: The specified mounted image cannot be committed back into the WIM

Error: 0xc142011d

The specified mounted image cannot be committed back into the WIM. This occurs when an image has been through a partial unmount or when an image is still being mounted. If this image was unmounted with commit earlier, then the commit probably succeeded. Please validate that this is the case and then unmount without commit.

The DISM log file can be found at C:\Windows\Logs\DISM\dism.log

If you get the above error when unmounting the image, try running DISM again with the /cleanup-wim option
DISM /cleanup-wim

6. Load Intel storage drivers during Windows install

Now we've injected the Intel storage drivers into the Windows boot image we can try installing Windows 11 again

Boot from USB and start Windows 11 setup

Load driver

Click browse

Select the Drivers folder

Select the Intel Optane Memory and Storage Management Extension iaStorHsa_Ext.inf and click next to load the driver

Repeat the steps to load the Intel RST VMD Controller 9A0B driver iaStorVD.inf

References:

Take Inventory of an Image or Component Using DISM
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/take-inventory-of-an-image-or-component-using-dism

Modify a Windows image using DISM
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/mount-and-modify-a-windows-image-using-dism

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