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I am running a perfectly normal, updated, copy of Windows 10 Home on my Dell Inspiron 5402. I can see all my drives and partitions as normal.

I boot into WinRE by doing RESET + SHIFT

I go into Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > Command Prompt

In the Command Prompt I can't find my Windows 10 C: drive.

I go into diskpart and run list disks and I get

There are no fixed disks to show

The WinRE Command Prompt would be kind of pointless if my drives are not accessible. What am I doing wrong?

One weird thing, that may be related, is that it does not ask me to login to my account when I open WinRE. I think it's supposed to do that right?

vinhboy
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1 Answers1

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After spending an entire freaking weekend on this, I finally figured it out. It's because the Dell BIOS uses "Intel Rapid Storage Technology" to enable RAID configuration.

However, the Dell WINRETOOLS windows recovery partition did not have the drivers required to use the Intel RST VMD controllers -- therefore, it could not load/read the hard drives.

So the solution is as follows:

  1. Use Diskpart to assign the Dell WINRETOOLS partition to a drive
  2. Find the winre.wim file and mount it using DISM
  3. Download and add the Intel RST VMD controller drivers to the image
  4. Save the image and boot into Windows Recovery Environment, it should work now.

My problem is specific to Dell, but this could potentially happen to any manufactures that has custom drivers for their hard disk controller. (Saw someone with an HP having similar issues)

I hope someone finds this information useful!

vinhboy
  • 279