Windows – Dual boot Windows 8 and Windows 7, why can’t Windows 8 installation see the drives

installationsatawindows 8

I am trying to install a dual boot Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 8 Pro on an XPS 8500 special edition. I created a new primary partition from my C drive, inserted the Windows 8 install disk, and rebooted my computer from the DVD.

I select custom install and the dialog box saying "Where do you want to install windows at?" pops up but none of my drives are listed. I don't understand why none of my drives are showing up on this menu. Not even the original drive. When I select to load a driver and click on the partition I created it tells me "No signed device drivers were found. Make sure the installation media contains the correct drivers, and then click OK."


Running the setup program from within the installed Windows instead of booting from DVD was able to locate my new partition and start install. It completes the first step of "Copying windows files" just fine but then on the next step "Getting files ready for installation" my computer restarts and attempts to load Windows 8 but keeps telling me my PC needs to restart. This keeps going on in an infinite boot loop. Please help, this has been a nightmare!

Best Answer

The solution to this problem was tracked through comments to the question itself but in case somebody stumbles upon something similar this would be the way of fixing it.

The problem with the setup program not being able to see drives or partitions may be related to it not having access to a suitable AHCI or RAID driver. Windows 8 supports some configurations but some others require a driver.

  1. Access a Windows 7 (or Vista, or XP) system running in the machine you wish to install, through the device manager find the SATA controler (AHCI or RAID may be in its name too). For example in this particular case it was "Intel(R) Desktop/Workstation/Server Express Chipset SATA RAID Controller".

  2. Download the drivers for your SATA or RAID controller, there'll need to be an INF file and some catalog and system files along. Copy them to a USB stick and reboot the computer booting into Windows 8 installation.

  3. When you reach the stage where you have to select where you'd like to install it plug in the USB stick (preferably in a USB 2.0 port, but I believe Windows 8 has native support for USB 3.0 too) and load the driver from the folder containing it.

  4. After that Windows should be able to access the drives and partitions and the installation should proceed as usual.

When the driver to access the storage system is not present by default in the installation DVD, installing from the Windows already running in the system is not recommended and may fail. The reason is that while that windows does have access to the drive, the new one wont and after rebooting it may lead to infinite reboot cycles.

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