Few Windows install screens stop people in their tracks like the one that reads “We couldn’t find any drives. To get a storage driver, click Load driver.” A Broxburn customer brought us a nearly-new laptop last month in exactly that state: a fresh USB installer burnt from Microsoft’s own tool, a healthy-looking SSD, and the setup wizard flatly refusing to acknowledge that any storage existed in the machine. The owner had assumed the drive was dead. In practice it almost never is.
This is how we actually work that problem on the bench, written down so a confident home user in Broxburn, Uphall or Livingston can tell which of the three usual causes they are looking at before deciding whether to carry on or bring the machine in.
What “No Drives Were Found” Actually Means
The Windows installer is a stripped-down version of Windows that boots from the USB stick. Like any Windows, it needs a storage driver to talk to the chip that controls the SSD. Where it differs is that it ships with only a short list of generic drivers; if your motherboard uses something more specific than that, the installer sees the controller, cannot speak to it, and reports back that there is simply no drive attached. The SSD is almost always fine. The problem is that the two devices have no shared language, and Windows cannot write anything to a drive it cannot address.
That is why “Load driver” is right there on the same screen. Microsoft knows this happens often enough to put the escape hatch directly under the error message. The question is which driver, and the answer varies by machine age.
Cause 1: The Intel VMD / RST Trap on Modern Laptops
On any laptop or new-build desktop from roughly 2022 onwards with an 11th-generation Intel chip or newer, there is a storage mode called Intel VMD (Volume Management Device), sometimes still labelled Intel RST on older firmware. It is enabled by default by most laptop makers and by many consumer motherboards, and it is the single commonest reason a modern Windows installer draws a blank at the drive-select screen. The chip in question is an NVMe SSD; it is there, it is healthy, and VMD is sitting between it and Windows setup speaking a dialect the stock installer does not know.
There are two honest fixes on the bench. The first is to load the correct Intel RST driver into setup from a second USB stick: download the F6 driver package that matches your laptop or motherboard model, extract it to a FAT32-formatted stick, click “Load driver” and point it at the folder. The drive then appears instantly. The second, which we use more often on single-drive consumer laptops, is to boot into the UEFI firmware and switch VMD off entirely before launching setup. The SSD then shows up to any installer unmodified. Neither route is destructive if the stick is prepared properly, but doing it blind can tie you in knots — the F6 driver has to match the chipset generation, not just “Intel RST”.
Cause 2: BIOS Mode and the Hidden NVMe on Older Hardware
On an older laptop or desktop — most machines built between about 2015 and 2020 — the fault is usually at the other end: an installer prepared the modern way (UEFI, GPT partitioning) booted into a firmware still set to Legacy/CSM mode, or vice versa. The installer refuses to lay down a Windows that will not boot afterwards, so instead of writing to the disk and leaving you with a brick, it quietly shows an empty drive list.
The honest diagnostic is to look at how the installer booted: on nearly every modern BIOS, the one-time boot menu lists each USB entry twice, once with a “UEFI:” prefix and once without. Pick the UEFI entry on a machine newer than roughly 2015, pick the non-UEFI entry only on genuinely old hardware with a BIOS that does not support UEFI boot. We also see this on tower PCs in Broxburn and Bathgate where someone has swapped in an NVMe SSD on an M.2-to-PCIe adapter: the drive is physically present but the BIOS has NVMe support disabled, or the system is set to boot from the old SATA controller only. Enabling NVMe boot in the firmware, or occasionally updating the BIOS to a version that supports it, is often all that is needed.
Cause 3: The Drive Really Is in Trouble
Rarely, the drive genuinely is the problem. On a used laptop pulled out of a cupboard, or a desktop that has been powered on through a dozen house moves, we do see SSDs that have simply failed. The giveaway is usually that the drive does not show up in the firmware either: boot into UEFI, open the storage page, and if the slot that should hold the NVMe or SATA SSD is empty, the installer is telling the truth. At that point no amount of F6 drivers will help; the chip or its controller has gone, and the honest conversation is about replacement, not reinstallation.
Before replacing anything, though, we always take a careful look at what was on the drive. If the machine used to boot and only recently started refusing, there is often data worth recovering before the SSD is swapped out. Our data recovery service exists for exactly this scenario: a drive that is intermittent or electrically weak often gives up its files to specialist tooling even when it has stopped presenting to Windows at all. Doing that step before you touch the storage is the difference between “a fresh install today” and “a reinstall and a quiet reunion with the family photos”.
The Bench Walk-through We Follow
When a Broxburn customer calls and says “Windows says there are no drives”, this is the order of checks we actually work through:
- Step 1 — open the firmware storage page. If the SSD is listed there, the drive is alive and the installer is the problem. If it is not listed, the drive is the problem and we move to recovery and replacement.
- Step 2 — check VMD / Intel RST status. On any machine with an Intel chip from the 11th generation up, this is the first thing we toggle. Nine times out of ten this alone unblocks the install on a modern laptop.
- Step 3 — verify the boot mode of the USB. Legacy versus UEFI mismatch is the second most common cause on anything older. Rebuilding the installer stick with Rufus and the correct partition scheme usually fixes it in one go.
- Step 4 — load the F6 storage driver. If VMD must stay on (for example because the laptop has a factory dual-drive configuration), we load the correct Intel RST or NVMe driver into setup from a second stick, and the drive appears.
- Step 5 — firmware update if required. On a handful of older desktops in and around Broxburn we have had to update the motherboard BIOS to a version that recognises a new NVMe drive before Windows setup would see it. We do this before the install, never during.
Our proper operating system installation job always runs through this list before the installer is launched, which is why “no drives were found” is a problem we tend to see once per machine, not twice. The flip side is that if the step list in your head is just “click Load driver, hope for the best”, it is very easy to spend an afternoon with an installer that will never finish, and that is normally when the laptop ends up on the bench.
While You Are In There: Storage Worth Rethinking
If the drive turned out to be at the end of its life, or the only reason you are reinstalling is a machine that has been quietly fighting a slow or dying disk for months, this is also the right moment to think about the storage itself rather than just repeating what was there. A customer in Livingston last winter arrived with an eight-year-old 128 GB SATA SSD that had never been big enough for Windows updates to sit comfortably; swapping it for a current NVMe at install time added capacity, speed and years of reliable life for not much more labour than the reinstall alone. Our hardware upgrades notes have the mechanical detail of that swap, but the simple takeaway is: if the drive is being touched anyway, this is the painless time to size it properly.
When It Is Worth Reinstalling at All
Not every “no drives found” call ends in a reinstall. Sometimes the honest answer is to fix the install media, boot the existing Windows, and leave the machine alone. We wrote a longer piece on exactly that question in our recent guide to whether you should reinstall Windows, and the companion clean install walk-through covers what to do when the honest answer is yes. If you are still unsure after reading them, the usual pattern on the bench is: a machine that boots but is slow or unstable rarely needs a reinstall, while a machine that will not boot at all nearly always does. A persistent software or driver problem that has survived a repair cycle is the other case where a clean install genuinely resolves things in a way that in-place repair does not.
Bringing It In
If the diagnostic list above has taken you as far as “the drive is in the firmware but the installer still cannot see it”, that is a job the bench finishes quickly: we have the right driver packages for every current chipset generation and the kit to prepare a correct installer stick on the spot. Where the drive is genuinely dead, we handle the recovery and the swap together so you do not end up juggling two separate visits. The Broxburn same-day computer repair page has the practical bits about collection and drop-off from the EH52 area, and the surrounding Uphall and Livingston pages cover the same workflow if you are nearer the motorway.
Either way, book the machine in online or get in touch and we will give you an honest, unhurried assessment before any installer is launched or any drive is swapped out.
Last updated: 9 October 2026