“No device drivers were found” when installing Windows 10
You may have experienced this issue while installing Windows 10 or newer inside a VMware VM that has been built with a VMware paravirtual controller. The Windows 10 image doesn’t have the driver for this controller type, so Windows can’t see the virtual disk that has been added to the VM.
Let me show you what are the main controller types that VMware offer.
- LSI Logic SAS
- LSI Logic Parallel
- VMware Paravirtual
There are two ways to resolve this issue.
- Change the SCSI controller types to one of the LSI adapters.
- Load the PVSCSI driver into the windows installer.
I will show you the second option, which most of them may have seen some issues loading the driver and waster their time on it.
To begin, you may need a second CD-ROM to mount the VMware tool ISO. VMware Tool ISOs can be downloaded from the Public VMware Repository. The same ISO can be found inside the ESXi as well however downloading from the repository is easier if you are not familiar with Linux.
Upload the VMware Tool.iso into the datastore where VM is running.
Next mount this VMware Tool.ISO into the second CD-ROM. Make sure to tick the connect button of the CD-ROM
Now go back to the VM console and navigate to the CD-ROM as below. Click on the Load driver
Below is the folder structure of the VMware Tool.iso. It has three folders for specifying the OS name.
This case the operating systems is Windows 10. Let’s try to expand the Win10 and load the driver.
Select the appropriate folder (Win10) and click OK.
You may be surprised but the Win10 driver can not be loaded here. I tried loading Win8 instead, and it loaded and detected the disk.
Finally disk is here.
You may proceed with the installation.
This is how the missing PVSCSI driver can be loaded into the Windows installer. Please remember to remove the second CD-ROM if it is not required and delete the VMware Tool.iso from the datastore to reclaim the space. (Not a big file though😉)
I hope this would help. Thanks so much for reading.
