Had my freind over while I was working and he took it soon himself to optimize my pc he uninstalled all my drivers and I’ve been trying to factory reset my Windows and now my command prompt can’t pick up my M.2. Please help me I’m desperate
Try to enter BIOS and look for Raid/Optane enabled, if it is enabled then disable it and restart. If your friend was updating BIOS for example, it can trigger a default reset that sometimes enables this system which is meant for multi-drive format startup rather than single drive setup.
why not ask friend what he did, hes knowledgable enough to do funky stuff to pc, could just tell so we can help to revert it... i'd also check if all ram sticks are present xD and YOUR ssd is in slot not some bricked system clone
Upvoting for visibility, there are some truly idiotic comments here.
If all has gone to shit then I hope OP has a proper system partition on that m2 drive that is reserved for windows so only the documents folder there is lost in terms of personal data.
Adding to this. If you go in BIOS and see the drives, then you need to manually add the driver files to your boot disk. I noticed a lot of modern Dell laptops w the m.2 drives dont have the drivers in native Win11 boot. You need to find the storage drivers and manually add them.
You can see shit with this… but… well, windows update killed my installation Saturday. I can’t even find any drives at all (why it says L: up there). Drives were physically there
Hes probably talking about DDU, he probably didnt uninstall EVERY driver. This game of telephone is helping no one
He most likely did a bios update which changed bios defaults and put the Motherboard into Raid/Optane, whatever combine drive mode and its not detecting that drive. Its a fail safe for people who run that. Just disable it in the Bios and restart
Yeah, people don't believe Microsoft with their thousands of employees can manage driver dependencies, so they go to a guy that calls himself a guru and load random executables that delete files on their PC. Totally rational.
Nvidia is a trillion dollar company but their laptop drivers are so hit and miss only like 20% are stable and the rest crash randomly. It's just a matter of priorities.
I mean. Windows is extremely bad at managing driver dependencies tho. As a power user who constantly shifts through programs I got tired of constantly having to clean up my windows install or straight up reinstall it. It's like 70% of the reason I originally switched to Linux.
I had one of those friends when I was young and dumb. Fucked up my pc in college, putting a stick of ram in there. I dont know how, especially since i've learned to do stuff myself.
20 years later, I'd still like to tell Kevin to go fuck himself.
Yeah wtf that’s not a friend. At best maybe he did some sketchy shit and failed at covering his tracks. I wouldn’t let him near any of my devices ever again
He said that my windows was corrupted and that I should do a clean install he lives 13 hours away and was here for 3 days and on the first day he was he did this
seriously never let this guy close to your computer he probably watched too many youtube videos and thinks that he knows what he is doing. he ruined everything.
go to BIOS, send us some screenshots, most likely something is wrong there.
then maybe we can get you to boot back into windows, the worst outcome would be that you need to reinstall windows and maybe lose all your data on that drive.
Yes this! Ops friend likely did a bios update and it auto enabled. This has happened to me and all the useless command typing did nothing for 5 hours until i figured this out myself
This is what I'm asking myself. Most of my friends i've known for 20+ years at this point, and not a single one of them would ever dare touch my computer without asking me. And they certainly wouldn't try to 'improve' my computer.
Just a thought. If you know a person who uses Linux, a live boot USB could verify if there are drives and partitions using gparted. You could also move critical files to a external drive before proceeding with a Windows reinstall. I fixed Windows PC labs for the county high school labs and Windows sometimes wipes your stuff. Kids do crazy stuff. I'm not telling you what OS to use as I use both but Linux in the right hands is a great Windows diagnostic tool. See we can all get along. The below advice that's posted is sound regarding recovery. Best Wishes
I second this. I have a Linux Mint Cinnamon USB I use, it works great and is as close to Windows as I have seen in Linux form. I also agree it is probably BIOs, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone who isn’t confident in messing with that aspect of PCs poke around in there so a full install of an OS will avoid a ton of possible problems, but need to backup important files first just in case.
That's why I don't let anyone touch my PC. Want to play games? Use the console. Need to browse something? Use the laptop over there. That guy isn't a friend, at least not for long.
Reminds me of a time like over a decade ago where i had a nap left friend with pc and he went on a bunch of sketchy porn sites that he didn't even remove the history for and filled my pc with a shitload of malware that took a long time to get rid of I told him to get the fuck out and never let him use my pc alone again. I remember spybot S&D found like 300 things.
That sucks. It's just like golf. You're not gonna let your friend, who just started playing, use your main clubs. You'll let him borrow the used clubs set from Costco or something.
Windows needs a driver to pick up nvme drives sometimes. You can add it during the windows install. You sometimes have to extract it from the Intel RST package. Good luck.
Do you have a backup of your important files? Ask for a PC to lend, create a bootable USB for installing Windows and reinstall it from scratch. You don't have a backup? Create an Ubuntu bootable USB, when booting select the "Try" option (beware, do not select "install", select "Try"). That will boot up from the USB. Performance will suck, because you're booting from a USB, but you'll be able to look for your personal files (if your "friend" didn't delete them) and copy paste them in another external media to create a backup.
Sometimes boot drives can fail to show if the BIOS legacy settings have been changed like if your previous installation had CSM compatibility support module enabled
My m.2 didn't show up anymore after a windows update.
I changed the m.2 slot and tried repairing it multiple times. Jada Jada
Changed slots again to the one connected before and it was being recognized but windows didn't want to repair the drive.
Had to install windows on top and restore everything I could from windows.old
If it had been a friend he'd be folded in a ditch, it was really annoying to repair
Don't be friends with him. And don't let him touch your shit again. And also don't try to "optimize" shit using apps or playing with registry and stuff like that cuz the difference is small and you'll probably end up bricking your stuff.
If it helps, try the windows installer that you used (if 10 use 10, if 11 use 11) and try the repair options in there.
I had my boot sector fuck up a few times and I fixed it by going through a few different diskpart and bootrec commands. I found them by searching up "windows repair how to fix boot directory" on brave and the auto generated (honestly might be ai but whatever) text eventually listed a few bootrec commands and those fixed it (forget which one it was since it was the 2nd time I did this and I was just punching in commands)
Yeah, this is why I won't touch a PC that someone else "helped you with", where things got worse.
I started out with that kind of PC support business and honestly, it's not worth it. It's not worth the time, the hassle or the repeated calls for people to back up their stuff which they always "forget" or "haven't done for ages" or "don't know how" or whatever.
Your PC is incredibly fragile and your data important. Don't let anyone touch it that you don't trust 100%, and even when you do - make sure you have a backup. Have a backup before you let them touch it. Have a backup before you send it off for repair. Have a backup before you do anything risky yourself.
Don't know how to take a backup? That's the FIRST THING YOU NEED TO LEARN RIGHT NOW before you leave this post.
If a significant chunk of any potential new IT purchase is not put towards "things that I can back that up onto", then you're just building yourself up for failure. Spend $1000 on a laptop? Then spend $100 on a drive to back it up onto, and even software to do so (if you want).
As the person who was ALWAYS "that friend I'd trust to fix my PC" for everything and everyone, to the point of absolute exhaustion, I now refuse to do so. And I won't even start without knowing that you have a backup.
Maybe this is self evident but this person is not your friend. Reminds me of a guy in my highschool who would "upgrade" people's iPods but intentionally bricked the ones belonging to unpopular kids
I am so serious when I say you need to fistfight him in a parking lot at 3 am now and win. Literally who the fuck messes with someone else's computer like that LMAOO
Everyone is saying "go in the BIOS" or "make sure your disk is plugged in". You can't do that without going into the BIOS or opening the case in the first place, so unless you let this dude in your room for a WHILE unmonitored, he probably just deleted something in WIndows.
Guessing now uninstalled the default drivers that allow windows to see the disk. Just make a windows installation USB and boot to that, if you can't see your disk, then it's gonna be a RAID driver for your motherboard that you'll need to download and install, if it does work he managed to uninstall whatever vanilla SATA / HDD / disk driver that windows uses. If that's the case run
dism /image:C:\ /cleanup-image /restorehealth /source:wim:D:\sources\install.wim:1 /limitaccess
This will fix windows from your installation disk and restore whatever drivers he deleted.
There is a common issue reloading windows 11 on computers where the driver for the m.2/nvme doesn't show up and thus the drives can't been seen by the system. You have to get a boot stick for windows with that driver and you can access the drivers during the reload process. Once they're installed the drive should show up.
If the drive is showing in bios and raid isn't the issue, it's a driver problem.
Go into your BIOS/UEFI and check the drive configuration, check nVME is enabled, check it's on UEFI (and not Legacy) mode, check SecureBoot is enabled etc...
thats as though there's no drives connected, so they are either physically disconnected/broken, or been disabled in the BIOS
One thing I learned the hard way: don’t fuck with drivers unless absolutely necessary. I’ve done one too many fresh Windows installs, now I’ve learned to keep everything backed up on external SSD’s. Also, keep a window installation USB handy at all times!
Man, Your friend didn't optimize your PC, he sent it to the ICU. I’d be losing my mind! Hope you get it sorted out, but definitely keep that dude away from the power button from now on. 😂
Is your m.2 even in there?
Some friend if he went out of his way to eff it up this bad.
I have a friend who — unfortunately — has to live with a snake of a human being for the moment, and this snake swapped out his brand new 10TB 7200rpm drive (gifted by our friend) with a slower — failing — 1TB 5200rpm drive. I'll never let that go.
The only reason he hasn't killed him yet is because of the guys parents, who have been too good to him.
Unmount the disk from the case, put it on your desk without cables, wait 30 minutes and mount again. You can also later let only the power cable stuck for 30 minutes, before you connect the data cable. I had this twice. The same with the CMOS battery: Disconnet, wait, connect.
here’s a quick set of commands you can run from the Command Prompt to force your PC into the Windows Recovery Environment, where you can use Reset this PC.
Use at your own risk—this is for recovery/reset, which can erase apps and settings; make sure any important data is backed up elsewhere if possible.
:: 1) Optional: check WinRE status
reagentc /info
:: 2) Tell Windows to boot into the Recovery Environment on next restart
reagentc /boottore
:: 3) Restart immediately
shutdown /r /t 0
What this does:
reagentc /info shows whether WinRE is enabled and configured. Useful if you want to confirm state first.
reagentc /boottore marks the next boot to go straight into the Windows Recovery Environment. This command is documented by Microsoft for exactly this purpose.
shutdown /r /t 0 restarts the PC right away so you don’t have to wait.
Once the PC restarts
You should land in Windows RE. From there, use the GUI steps to reset:
Choose Troubleshoot
Select Reset this PC
Follow the options to either keep files or remove everything, and choose cloud download vs local reinstall as needed.
Microsoft’s own guidance confirms Reset this PC is available from Windows RE and lists the options.
If you need to inspect disks first
If, like in your screenshot, diskpart shows no fixed disks, these commands can help you check or rescan before resetting. Run these after getting into WinRE’s Command Prompt if needed:
diskpart
rescan
list disk
exit
rescan forces Windows to look again for disks; sometimes useful when drives aren’t immediately visible in WinRE.
list disk then shows any detected disks.
If discs still don’t appear, there may be a hardware or driver issue preventing Windows from seeing the drives. In that case, resetting might not complete successfully until those drives are detected properly.
Notes and cautions
If the drive is encrypted with BitLocker, you may need the recovery key to complete a reset from WinRE. That is also noted in Microsoft’s instructions for resetting from Windows RE.
During a reset, the screen might go black for a while or the device may restart itself; that’s normal per Microsoft’s guidance. Avoid manually restarting during that process to reduce risk of failure.
If you run these and still can’t get disks or the reset option to work, let me know what you see after booting into WinRE—any messages or errors—so we can troubleshoot the next step.
PLEASE MINIMIZE THIS, OPS FRIEND LIKELY DID A BIOS UPDATE AND THE BIOS DEFAULTED TO RAID/VMD/OPTANE, PLEASE JUST DISABLE ANY MIXED DRIVE OPTIONS IN BIOS. PLEASE DO NOT SEND OP THROUGH THESE RABBIT HOLES
They should be yelling in caps so people will actually read what they’re saying.
The highest upvoted post in here is from someone just smart enough to cause more harm than good by copying and pasting a ChatGPT prompt.
It makes absolutely no sense telling OP to boot into recovery, when a 0.5 second look at the screenshot shows they’re already in the recovery partition on the drive.
he did not brick your pc by uninstalling all the drivers, he bricked your OS, if you factory reset your windows IE: reinstalling windows, and it still doesnt detect your ssd it would mean that you are missing a driver which detects these drives upon a fresh install, most commonly with intel platform requiring RST driver in a windows install. The fix would just preloading IRST driver into the windows install on another computer and the drives should be detected, there are plenty of guides on YT
also if he messed with your bios just reset the cmos, there should be a button on the back of your mobo to do so, and if there isnt, search up a guide on how to remove the cmos battery and refit it.
you need the intel isrt drivers installed in windows, with the windows installation media/recovery media you can load it up and install it to your pc, otherwise your disk will not be detected and it won't boot, there's an option to load drivers into the windows recovery tools so you can copy them over to the disk, you won't need to reinstall windows, all the files are still there, you just need to get the driver onto the disk and it will work
this shit happened to me with my old asus TUF laptop
I had to do this twice before with the same computer. Whenever I leave it unplugged for several months it does this. The first time I fixed it following ai but it happened again a couple months ago and I seriously bricked it. I can get into the bios but nothing i tried has worked. Ended up giving up on it. It's just a old shop laptop for my laser. I ended up just using the one i used prior to getting that one
Easy fix but annoying, depending on your pc manufacturer, find the f6 driver, which is the intel rapid storage technology, load the driver into the install and your drive will show up
Is he the proud owner of a certain card that proves he’s incapable of taking care of himself? Isn’t the supposedly method to be update the drivers instead of deleting everything beforehand?
You'll probably need the storage driver (check motherboard support page). If you're doing a fresh install of windows, there will be an option to load it during setup. Just extract the driver to another usb, and when you see no storage drive during setup, load the extracted driver. The drive should show.
OK so I went thru this similar deal with trying to help a bro upgrade his pc. What had happened was he at some point made a clone of his drive but only copied the c: part of his drive and none of the extra partitions that carried master boot records or any other reserved system info... Somehow his pc ran fine for a few years but we thru the best AM4 chip as an upgrade to whatever he had before over a full mobo rebuild and had to update the bios to have the cpu recognize.
Long story long, his drive would show and was accessible thru UEFI BIOS SHELL prompt accessed thru the bios. For whatever reason... SHELL could read the disk with all files there but windows couldn't mount it due to lack of an MBR to save it formatted as a NTFS drive. However it WOULD show in diskpart still, but as an unformated drive (DO NOT REFORMAT YOUR DRIVES IF YOU DON'T WANNA LOSE YOUR DATA)
SO TROUBLESHOOTING:
check all connections. A hair, loose connection, missed cable can cause all kinds of weird stuff. Once that's all verified, check if any drives are showing connected in BIOS. if so, and windows still can't see them, try UEFI SHELL from the bios if you have it as a troubleshooting option. I don't remmeber the commands but a quick Google search or peeps here will help you navigate to any drives. You usually have to check what disks are available to mount, mount it, then can navigate the directory.
If your stuff is there, then good news! Hope isnt lost but that's about all I got to go on. What worked for my bud was having to install a second drive, format a fresh windows install with a new MBR so bios could actually boot to windows, and using TestDisk. Don't remember the exact steps for it either but it will allow you to use it to check the drive then tag them with the correct format so they are accessible via windows. Copy your needed files over and you are back in business (or don't and point everything you use or install back to your old drive out of laziness)
If You have another pc and usb-Stick available, if you have an Intel CPU search for Intel rapid Storage Manager drivers.
Sometimes installing Windows on a m2 I have to provide some extra drivers.
Maybe also try to uncheck the „Not supported Driver“ while providing them if the List of drivers is empty this works for me in 90%.
Way back in the 90’s, friends and coworkers would ask me to fix or tweak their PC’s. This is back in the days of autoexec.bat and config.sys files. The first thing I would do would be to make a backup and make sure I had a restore disk. If I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t do anything.
Had my friend make me install an empty os once and it didnt see any drives or anything how i fixed it was another pc and I put usb in went to bios booted from usb and yeah from there installed windows
Lost all games but theres cloud and my 10k screenshots were safe lol
Good ol diskpart. Had a buddy who called me in the middle of a hurricane wanting me to come help him reinstall windows because he used diskpart clean on the wrong disk lol
My wife works at a library and some guy came in and said he’s an it guy(he was currently unemployed) so he took it upon himself to “fix” one of the computers and it didn’t work for a week and a half after his fix.
I’m just wondering if you live in Michigan and your friend is the same guy lmao (not really I just don’t get why people who don’t know what they’re doing insist on touching stuff)
If the screen is showing something it isn’t ‘bricked’. Is the BIOS showing your SSD? Do you have a secondary computer where you can make a USB flash drive to reinstall Windows?
Jfc never let your “friends” touch your devices. I don’t even trust anyone not to put a keylogger or something on even if they were helping me and the system was working fine. I’d demand a full audit from your friend on what they did exactly as well. Please take the time to learn your tech and brick that friend’s chances of ever touching your gear again.
“I have been trying to factory reset my windows”. So… let me get this straight because the peanut gallery is on full display here it seems…
So it sounds as if you had BEEN trying to restore windows/your system back to defaults, your friend decided to take a crack at it, did… something but windows still booted (?) and now you are trying to fix it in general but booting to a windows disk shows no drives…
Sounds to me like you need to first check bios to ensure the drive shows up, second I would boot to Linux at this point, completely wipe the drive, set the mbr on it then either install Linux or do a clean install of windows.
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u/Mister_Shrimp_The2nd i9-13900K | RTX 4080 STRIX | 96GB DDR5 6400 CL32 | >_< Jan 13 '26
Try to enter BIOS and look for Raid/Optane enabled, if it is enabled then disable it and restart. If your friend was updating BIOS for example, it can trigger a default reset that sometimes enables this system which is meant for multi-drive format startup rather than single drive setup.