Windows 11 Setup

Question

Hi there,

So this is quite a major problem, I bought a DELL XPS15 9510 quite a while ago running WINDOWS11 already.

Specifications are default, TPM 2.0, SECURE BOOT, etc.

Then I did a weird techy stuff of changing to ArchLinux for a day, formatted the disk and everything, and was running arch for like 2 days before I get too dizzy and just wanted to get back to WIN11.

Then I downloaded and burnt the ISO Files needed to setup WIN11 again, but the weird thing is that Windows Setup cannot find any drives. Is it because my disk is formatted to Linux and is UEFI Encrypted? If there is any Windows x Linux God please help me resolve this. I have been using windows since I am a kid and tried exploring the difficult stuff, ended up writing this message in Arch Linux.

Answer 1

Since you are doing clean install you have to delete all partition so that eventually you have only one large unallocated space. Select that, click Next to continue installation and installer will create required partitions.

Answer 2

Hi Pauli!

Thanks for answering, so I change it to AHCI and it loaded my drivers. yay!

But one problem, my partition 3 (457.8GB) NVMe shows "Windows cannot be installed to this hard disk. Windows must be installed to a partition formatted as NTFS."

"Windows cannot be installed to this hard disk space. The partition is of an unrecognized type".

The same goes for partition 1 and 2 which is realtively small (formatted when installing Arch Linux).

I'm afraid to press delete since something could just happen right.

Thank you in advance you're awesome!

Answer 3

Go to BIOS and check which SATA operation mode is in use.

By default some Dell models SATA operation is set to Intel RST RAID instead of more common AHCI mode. Because of this RAID mode Windows installer doesn't see disk without additional driver. This can be fixed by going to BIOS and changing RAID to AHCI before start installation.