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Comment by trinsic2 | Hacker News Reader

You can switch into ACHI mode for NVME drives. The point is you cannot install windows clean without either having the RST driver, if your storage device is set to a RAID configuration in the BIOS, or switching into AHCI mode which my article describes. Since the Dell Laptop model I described did not have an option to switch from RAID into ACHI I was unable to install windows clean without the RST Driver. And that driver is not included on Dell's Website.

Please tell me where this is misguided..

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IDK about misguided, but I just went to the Dell website, went to support, looked up the Inspiron 16 Plus model 7640, and promptly found an Intel RST driver [0].

I am not disputing your experience at all, but it is weird to me that we'd need an RST driver to install Windows with an NVMe device; RST is a SATA/AHCI RAID tech, and while it does also do something with the 'optane memory' accelerators that Intel used to sell, I wouldn't have expected it to also make NVMe drives visible to the installer. My own experience is not current at this point, though.

[0] https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetai...

I was also able to find that driver and posted it in another thread. I can fully believe that it wasn't available when OP searched for it, but maybe they just didn't find it due to Dell's support site being somewhat difficult to navigate for people who aren't used to troubleshooting Dell computers and especially clean installing or dual booting them.

One workaround is to install in AHCI mode and then use the safe mode method to switch the storage mode out from under Windows, install missing drivers for the desired boot mode under safe mode if they aren't installed automatically by Windows, then reboot to exit safe mode.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/22631-enable-ahci-window...

https://www.tenforums.com/drivers-hardware/15006-attn-ssd-ow...

However, OP doesn't seem to have the option to switch to anything other than RST, which could be due to BIOS settings and/or Windows settings, as well as flags on your partitions that cause Windows to boot in read only mode. You might need to toggle some settings for legacy/uefi compatibility mode, reset BIOS/EFI to (un optimized for Windows 8/10/11) default settings, disable secure boot temporarily, etc to let the EFI allow you to toggle the boot mode on some Dell BIOSes, however, especially in OP's case where they appear to not have any alternate drive modes besides RST in BIOS/EFI. In especially bad cases, you might even need to update the BIOS to enable these modes and/or wipe the EFI partitions and possibly the entire boot drive, as sometimes the BIOS/EFI is inserting itself in the boot process via "dirty bits" and/or Fast Startup mode.

https://superuser.com/questions/1554458/how-does-windows-loc...

This must be a difference between the methods we are using to look up drivers. I'm using dell's support site and typing the dell service tag to look at all the drivers. When I click on storage drivers section, I see nothing in the RST department. Your link seems to point to a search tool to find RST drivers which I did not know about.

I did dell.com -> support -> drivers & downloads -> type "Inspiron 16 Plus" instead of the service tag and pick the 7640 model from the drop down -> select 'Driver' for download type and 'Storage' for the category.

I'd be pretty disappointed if I put in an actual service tag and nothing showed up. I wonder if it's showing you stuff that's been released since your specific laptop left the factory? This RST driver is dated November 29.

I'm a bit lost in all this, except for kind of thinking that it shows X86 is a giant mess.

First, doesn't Windows knows how to use NVME drives as NVME drives, without going through some weird SATA compatibility layer? Second, if I'm reading you right, Windows also has bundled drivers for RST. It's just that the installer doesn't.

Is that right? Are you saying that the Windows installer doesn't know how to use storage interfaces that the final installed Windows system would know how to use, and furthermore that those include storage interfaces that might be used for the boot drive? So in order to install, you have to get an RST driver and somehow load it into the installer, but after that the system will work?

Because that sounds like a Windows problem more than a BIOS problem. You're installing your OS on reasonably vanilla storage[^1]. Why would you expect to have to download a driver from Dell at all?

[^1]: Sort of vanilla. I don't know about this "RST" nonsense and am suspicious of anything that might make it hard to move a drive, or indeed an entire RAID array, to another computer or controller intact.

Are you saying that the Windows installer doesn't know how to use storage interfaces that the final installed Windows system would know how to use, and furthermore that those include storage interfaces that might be used for the boot drive? So in order to install, you have to get an RST driver and somehow load it into the installer, but after that the system will work?

After reading the Dell documentation... yeah, that's exactly the situation. A laptop only has one drive BTW.

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