XC-1660G: not recognizing M.2

Hi, I am trying to install a Crucial - P5 1TB 3D NAND PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe Internal Solid State Drive M.2 into a 1160G Acer desktop. The Acer has the i5-11400 processor. It also has an M.2 slot (512GB) and the new drive fits into the slot perfectly.

When I boot up the PC with the Windows USB drive installed and try to install a clean copy of Windows 10, the installer tells me that it cannot find a hard drive.

Is the above M.2 drive compatible with my computer? If so, any idea how to get the computer to recognize the hard drive? I'm in BIOS but unsure what settings to change. Nothing really sticks out as the correct fix.

Many thanks!

edit: When I'm in BIOS, the only setting that looks remotely close is the "Integrated Perhipherals" and when I go in there, I can either enable or disable the onboard SATA controller or change the Onboard SATA mode to "Intel RST" (which it currently is) or "AHCI"

Unsure what to do

[ Edited title to add the name of the product]

Accepted answers

All comments

Needhelpm2

Edit2:

So on a whim I changed it to "AHCI" and now "Drive 0 Unallocated space 931.5 GB" is showing up when I run the Windows 10 install (via USB). Crossing fingers this works...

Larryodie

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-installation-media-for-windows-99a58364-8c02-206f-aa6f-40c3b507420d

OR Clone it from your old hard drive. Like Macrium or Acronis etc

Needhelpm2

Larryodie said:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-installation-media-for-windows-99a58364-8c02-206f-aa6f-40c3b507420d

OR Clone it from your old hard drive. Like Macrium or Acronis etc

The old hard drive was busted completely—I accidentally turned off the computer in the middle of a Windows Update. I thought it was frozen. For the past 24 hours, I kept trying to figure out why WiFi wasn't working—why I couldn't restore Windows back to the way it came—the PC had some serious issues.

What I'm wondering is that the old M.2 hard drive (that came stock with the computer) had "Intel RST" enabled in BIOS. The new M.2 hard drive only works with AHCI enabled.

Is there a difference and why did one work but not the other?

Also, I successfully installed Windows on the new HDD. Very happy (since I'm not exactly a smart tech guy)

Needhelpm2

Ah, my USB drives are not showing up in File Explorer. Is this because I switched it to ACHI from "Intel RST" in the BIOS?

Larryodie

Enable F12 in Bios then reboot taping F12.
Have your boot USB inserted.

Larryodie

I don't know about ACHI from "Intel RST" in the BIOS?
I've always done a F9 then save in bios to restore it then reboot and enable F12, then reboot with the USB inserted.

Needhelpm2

Larryodie said:

Enable F12 in Bios then reboot taping F12.
Have your boot USB inserted.

I don't understand what this means. Windows is already re-installed. I can't find a way to enable f12 in bios. The bios is nowhere near as robust as my gaming PC. very few settings in acer bios

Larryodie

I'm sorry. I suppose that your bios is different that my TC-895 ?
You need ACER assistance.
You didn't tell us how you got Windows installed ?

Commodore_1995#

I can't find the aspire 1160G model. Can you tell me the correct model name? About the drivers problem, are there any drivers with problems in the device manager?

ttttt

@Needhelpme2

I suppose you have a XC-1660G-UW93, since it is using i5-11400 CPU.

I have tried both RST Optane mode and AHCI mode on my TC-885-UA91 before and I could not tell any difference in performance and other aspects, as long as the PC is working. The RST-Optane mode WAS benefical when M.2 NVMe SSD was not popular yet and people could use Intel's Optane memory for better performance. When people try to install Linux distros, some must use AHCI mode.

Nowadays, I set to AHCI mode as default.

For your case, if you have the latest BIOS and you are sure the M.2 NVME SSD installed properly ( I'll suggest taking it out and install again to make sure that) and the drive still will not appear under BIOS, then I'll say either the drive is bad or incompatible with your PC.

billsey

The USB drives could have been set to one of the RAID modes that RST has, that would screw up accessing them via File Explorer. What does Disk Management say about them? They might just not be getting mounted to a drive letter...

lsvtec4dr

FYI - you should check out my post
https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/665802/acer-xc-1660g-uw93-issues-replacing-upgrading-nvme-w-clean-win11-install#latest

I haven’t done a clean install in awhile and wanted to upgrade my nvme and do a clean install with 11 and like you i ran into the issue of no drives present during the install from the usb win 11 drive I downloaded. I left my irst and AHCI alone because I did change it and I can’t remember what I was doing at the time but I couldn’t boot into windows. So I left it alone. The fix that recognized my drives was I downloaded the non-VMD drivers from the link below, extracted it, and put the extracted folder on an additional usb. I heard you could throw that folder in the windows usb media you created but since I had an extra usb drive, I just put the drivers in there. Plugged both the win 11 usb and the drive containing the drivers. Started it up, hit F12 to boot from the usb, started the clean install and when it got to asking where to install, I chose the load driver, pointed to the other USB, and it listed the driver as compatible and loaded it. Once it was done my hard drive was present, deleted all the partitions and continued the clean install.

Here’s the link to the drivers:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19512/intel-rapid-storage-technology-driver-installation-software-with-intel-optane-memory-10th-and-11th-gen-platforms.html

Hope this sheds some new light for you.

billsey

Yes, it's usually easier to just extract the RST driver package to the same flash drive you are installing from, but you can do it from a different drive if needed.

Quick Links

Top Members

Weekly

Puraw 145

Swift Series Intel^® Evo™

Game Pass

Acer Corner

Gaming on Chromebook

Swift Series Intel® Evo™

Game Pass

Acer Corner

Gaming on Chromebook

Swift Series Intel^® Evo™