HP Z440 installation Windows 10

[kiai969]

I'm having a problem with an HP Z440 workstation. The hard drive failed, and I want to reinstall on an SSD. After the initial boot from a USB stick, neither Windows 10 nor 11 see the SSD or hard drive. I tried flashing the chipset drivers, but nothing changes.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You may have to install the IRSTe controller drivers for Windows to find the drive in either OS.

I have zipped up and attached those drivers below.

Unzip and copy all of the files in the folder in the attachment to a USB flash drive.

Have the flash drive and your Windows installation media plugged into USB ports.

Boot from the Windows installation flash drive.

When you get to the screen where no drives can be found, click on the Load driver option, browse to the flash drive with the storage controller drivers on it.

If you check the box, it will only include the compatible driver.

If Windows still can't find the drive, uncheck the box to include the compatible driver and try any of the ones listed.

[SDH]

Also, there can be BIOS settings changes that cause what you are seeing. I also can confirm that the Intel RSTe drivers ("e" means Enterprise) are not provided by clean installs using the USB W10 bootable installer drives made through Microsoft, or Rufus USB W11 bootable installer drives for the Z440/ Z640 workstations (don't have a Z840 but believe same is true). Also, Microsoft Windows Update does not provide the Intel RST"e" capable drivers for these ZX40 workstations. However, the HP W10 Cloud Recovery whole-system-installer does (assuming you have a from-HP Windows licensed workstation). The from-HP Linux ones can't run that installer.

I believe the "e" part issue is related to licensing of the Enterprise RAID software. The same hardware may also be used on non-"e" licensed motherboards, but HP paid Intel for the right to use the "e" enabled software and that licensing comes with your workstation. Paul provides the correct e-enabled HP driver installer, which installs and works here perfectly on ZX40 workstations even when they are running the latest W11 25H2 updated releases. Both HP and Intel recommend having the BIOS storage setting at the RAID + AHCI equivalent (which is also what is in Factory Defaults) even if you will never use RAID.

I may have experience that will benefit you, having recently upgraded some of our officially W11-unsupported Z440 and Z640 workstations to W11 25H2 using the Rufus-modified USB boot drive technique. After that is done I then upgraded the storage controller drivers to the "e" version using the HP SoftPaq Paul provides above.  This method also works if you are installing from a bootable Microsoft or Rufus W11 USB installer drive onto officially W11-supported workstations where I also use DiskPart from inside the booted USB as shown in the attached PDF below.  During the install be patient... when you do this the installer needs to think a bit:

[DGroves]

TO "SDH" and anyone else who's curious in Intel RST/RstE drivers the difference is not a licensing issue but rather the supported featureset when a motherboard mfg. buys a Intel or AMD chipset they automatically receive the legal right to use the associated software for that chipset

Intel for whatever reasons will develop a chipset for a cpu line and then purposely split that chipset design into consumer/ business/workstation/server variants with the server chipset usually being the all chipset's options enabled 

the workstation variant chipset may be almost or exactly the same feature wise but may have lower limits on ram/sata ports/ECC capability than the server chipset

the consumer chipset will usually be one where most features are either removed or severely limited

due to the changes in the allowed abilities of the chipsets intel has different part numbers for them and all current modern intel CPU's now incorporate the PCH (Platform Controller Hub chip) which on older chipsets was a separate discrete chip

and these differences in the chipsets Hard Drive feature set  required different drivers,... one of the main differences is the number of SATA ports supported and how said sata ports are accessed on a intel chipset the first 2 or4 are usually the same across all chipset variants using the MS windows built-in driver with any additional sata ports using a different chipset specific  driver for the additional sata ports that said chipset supports and this driver is what is known as the Intel RstE driver with the "E" standing for enterprise

[kiai969]

I solved it thanks, I found the correct drivers