"Media Driver required" for second Win10 installation on same machine

Question

I'm trying to install a second copy of Windows 10 on my machine to run side-by-side with my existing install. I have spare, empty drives in the computer.

I installed the copy of Windows 10 that is aready on the machine without any difficulty. This installation can see all of the drives in the computer via the 'computer management' app, although it doesn't have drive letters mapped for everything as some drives have no partitions.

When I try to install an additional copy of Windows the machine boots from the install media, and the 'Install Now' button is available. After I click it there is a pause and I am then presented with the 'Media Drivers are required' box, telling me that it needs a driver before the installatino can proceed. Specifically:

A media driver your computer needs is missing. This could be a DVD,USB or hard disk driver. If you have CD, DVD or USB flash drive on it, please insert it now.

This didn't happen when I installed for the first time.

I've tried booting from different sources (USB in USB3 and USB2 ports, optial drive) and using different ISOs (I have a MSDN account.) I've verified the SHA1sum of the ISOs I've downloaded.

I've tried adding all SATA and USB drivers available on my motherboard's website but none of them allow me to pass the dialog - they show up as a hardware device, but clicking 'next' tells me that no new hardware is detected.

I've also tried pulling the entire 'inf' and 'drivers' folders from my working Windows install onto the USB stick. When I try using this it detects lots of hardware (eventually) but I'm still met with the 'no new hardware' message.

I can open a command prompt (shift+f10) and run diskpart. I can see all of the partitions on all of the disks, and can create partitions and format them. Essentially I can see all of the HDD/SSD drives in the machine, plus the installation media, from the command prompt.

I have no idea what Windows thinks is missing, that it needs a driver for. I don't know if it's possible to find this information in a log somewhere?

The only thing that's different is that I've installed Linux alongside Windows after completing the initial install. I can't see why this would make Windows require an additional driver though.

Can someone shed some light on how I can get past this error?

Answer 1

When diskpart can see your storage media, the problem lies in the source-drive used for the installation. At first this seems counter intuitive: Windows ISOs come as UDF formatted hybrid ISO files. Some BIOS-Implementations won't detect them as valid UEFI-devices. Others do detect them in the first place and allow booting them. But later the Windows 10 installer fails to recognize those devices as source-media.

You can try to be UEFI-compliant and create an FAT32 formatted drive(e.g. as first "active" aka bootalbe partiton in an GPT layout). Then copy all files provided by Microsoft from the mounted ISO file to the newly created FAT32 partition.

In my case an "MSI X470 Gaming Plus" board would boot the Windows installer but only the non-UDF-variant could proceed the installation.