Windows 11 Installation - A Media Driver Your Computer Needs Is Missing#

Problem#

I was trying to install a Windows 11 alongside my Ubuntu 22.04. Since I have two SSD cards on my desktop so this should save me a lot of trouble.

As usual, I downloaded the .iso disk image from the Microsoft webiste. Since I used Mac the most, I created a bootable USB with Etcher on my MacBook.

Etcher warned about “missing partition table” about the disk image but some developers said this is just a warning and it would probably still work.

../_images/build_iso-01.png

However, it didn’t. The windows installation system failed and said that “A media driver your computer needs is missing”.

Possible Fixes#

I searched the Internet and found a lot of similar issues. Possible fixes include

  • Corrupted iso disk image

  • Faulty USB drive

  • Trying another USB port

  • Chaing BIOS settings: USB support, SATA, etc.

  • Formating disks from a ubuntu disk image or diskpart

None of these worked for me.

Solution#

Finally I decided to start from scratch and see which step may go wrong.

I downloaded the Windows 11 .iso disk image again. Since Etcher is giving this weird message, I decided to create the USB bootable by hand.

  1. Format the USB drive with Disk Utility. Make sure the format is MS-DOS (FAT) and the scheme is Master Boot Record.

  2. Mount the .iso disk image on MacBook. To do this, open Disk Utility and choose File >> Open Disk Image….

  3. Copy all files in the mounted disk image to the USB drive, except sources/install.wim.

  4. sources/install.wim is more than 4GB and cannot be copied to a Fat-32 file system. We could use wimlib to split and copy the file.

$ brew install wimlib
$ wimlib-imagex split /Volumes/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-US_DV9/sources/install.wim /Volumes/WINUSB/sources/install.swm 4000

After the process is finished, we may start the Windows 11 installation and boot the machine from the bootable USB drive.

Conclusion#

Installing Windows 11 has always been a smooth process for me until this time. It turns out there are many possible setups that would fail the installation. For me, it was the Etcher on MacBook. It seems that there are no good bootable USB builders for Windows 11 on MacBook or Linux, and the only one that works fine is Rufus on Windows.