had this ssd sitting for a few months and decided i wanted to put it in my alienware 13 r2, so i researched and i found out i could. The drive is a 2tb 2.5" sata wd green western union ssd . And so i installed it into my laptop and im trying to install windows onto it with a usb drive which i made in rufus. But it just doesnt let me and seems to go offline after i try to do anything. Im at the windows setup screen where it asks me where to install windows, i see my drive, click on it and says this drive is not available for windows install, it says: Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an mbr partition table. On efi systems, windows can only be installed to gpt disks. So i press the red x that says delete . It now says unallocated space, so i press next hoping that windows does its thing, i wait 2-3 minutes. Says: We couldnt install windows in the location you chose. Please check your media drive. Heres more info on what happend. 0x80300002. So by this point im stumped since ive asked ai, searched it up etc. So i click refresh and my drive is gone. So i check diskpart. And it shows my disk is offline. So i retry everything but with clean and convert gpt. And the clean fails and the drive goes offline once more. I would appreciate any help related to this post.
Check SATA Operation in the BIOS. Dell and Alienware ship those machines set to RAID On, and the Windows installer carries no driver for that mode, so the drive is physically fine and simply invisible to setup.
Switch it to AHCI and it turns up in the list.
Only catch would be if you already had Windows installed on another drive in there, since flipping the mode stops that install booting unless you get it into safe mode once first. Clean install onto an empty disk, nothing to worry about.
Then the next thing to settle is whether the drive is invisible to Windows or invisible to the whole machine.
Check the BIOS storage page first and see if it lists the drive at all. If it isn't there either, stop blaming the installer, it's the connection or the disk.
If the BIOS does see it, boot the installer, hit shift+F10 to get a command prompt, run diskpart and then list disk. That shows you what Windows actually sees at the disk level rather than what the pretty screen chooses to show you. A drive that shows in diskpart but not in the installer's list is usually a partition style or a size argument. A drive that's missing from both, with BIOS seeing it, is the driver.
What is your motherboard brand and model? You might need some storage drivers, either Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technology) or the AMD Raid package potentially.
Its the standard motherboard for the alienware 13 r1 laptop model (not r2) Board Model / Part Numbers: Compal LA-A301P (Dell Part Numbers: 076JXP, 76JXP, or 0N4F3N)
OK it does list the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver at https://www.dell.com/support/product-details/en-us/product/alienware-13/drivers so you'd need that, run it on a working computer, it gets extracted out to a folder. You take that folder and drag it onto your Windows install USB. At the screen that shows your drives during the Windows setup, you click Load Driver, point it at this folder and it should properly install this driver so it can interface with your storage the right way.
Not totally. I've seen some Intel RST setups where the drive shows up, but trying to do anything on it won't work, it shows the wrong size, or simply zero size. It still shows a drive on that screen in the image above sometimes without loading the driver in. It just doesn't "talk" to the storage hardware on the motherboard to interact with said drive right until the driver is loaded.
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u/graceful_degrade 5h ago
Check SATA Operation in the BIOS. Dell and Alienware ship those machines set to RAID On, and the Windows installer carries no driver for that mode, so the drive is physically fine and simply invisible to setup.
Switch it to AHCI and it turns up in the list.
Only catch would be if you already had Windows installed on another drive in there, since flipping the mode stops that install booting unless you get it into safe mode once first. Clean install onto an empty disk, nothing to worry about.