VMD RAID 1 Windows Installation Help

[TylerBurgess]

Hello,

I set up a RAID 1 volume in the bios of my Z790 Aorus Elite AX 1.1 with 2 identical 4TB NVMe SSDs.

My USB Windows 11 installation begins with the "Install Driver to show Hardware" step, and forces me to browse for a driver folder.

I have tried putting every driver I could find for my motherboard from the Gigabyte website onto a separate USB drive, and browsing to them at this step, and either none of them show up, or are incompatible.

I have tried creating a simple volume on each of the SSDs before hand as well and still no luck.

For reference here is where I got the drivers: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/Z790-AORUS-ELITE-AX-rev-1x/support

I made sure to use the Windows 11 64bit versions.

I am not sure how to proceed. I tried downloading this RAID driver but the installation fails I am not sure how to get a working driver loaded in the installation.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[n_scott_pearson]

Do the following:

1. Open https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/Z790-AORUS-ELITE-AX-rev-1x/support.
2. Select SATA RAID/AHCI.
3. Download Intel SATA Preinstall driver.
4. Open resulting ZIP file (mb_driver_intel_bootdisk_irst_19.5.0.1037.zip) in tool of choice (I use 7-Zip, for example) and extract contents to a temporary folder.
5. In this temporary folder, browse down to folder IRST\VMD.
6. Copy folder f6vmdflpy-x64 and its contents to the root folder of your Windows installation media.
7. Start your Windows installation.
8. When you get to the folder selection scene, load the driver from the f6vmdflpy-x64 folder on your installation media.

You should be good to go at that point.

Hope this helps,

...S

[Allen12]

Hi @TylerBurgess, to install Windows on your RAID 1 with VMD, use the Intel RST F6 driver. Download the latest Intel RST .exe for 12th–13th Gen platforms, choose “Extract” to a USB, then point Windows Setup to the folder with the .inf files at the “Load Driver” step. Ensure VMD and RAID are enabled in BIOS. Pre-formatting the SSDs isn’t necessary; Windows will handle partitions once the RAID is recognized.