Windows 10 Installation - A media driver your computer needs is missing

The most weird thing is happening to me: I have a hp notebook which has no internal DVD drive, so I installed via an external USB LG Blueray burner.

1. First I installed Windows 10 customer preview into one partition.
2. Then I installed Windows 8 into another partition.

All works fine. I have dual boot computer where I can test my software on Windows 8 and 10.

The computer has the following partitions:

1. Recovery partition (300 MB)
2. EFI System partition (100 MB)
3. Data partition (400 GB)
4. Windows 8 (40 GB)
5. Window 10 preview (40 GB)

I repeat: All works fine. Neither the installation of Windows 8 nor 10 preview produced any problem.

Now comes the most weird thing that I have seen: As the final Windows 10 is out now, I wanted to replace the Windows 10 preview with the final Windows 10.

I boot the installation DVD, after a while comes the screen where I can select the language. Then comes a screen with a button in the center that says "Install Now" and then comes a message "Setup is starting".

Up to here all fine. But then comes a strange error:

A media driver your computer needs is missing. This could be a DVD,USB or hard disk driver. If you have CD, DVD or USB flash drive on it, please insert it now.

Note: If the installation media for Windows is in the DVD drive or on a USB drive, you can safely remove it for this step.

First: this error is not understandable. Second: It does not make any sense. When setup was already running up to here this means that it CAN read the DVD. So what driver should be missing?

Some people reported similar problems with Windows 7 where the cause was that it did not boot from a USB 3.0 port. But this cannot be the culprit because

1. Windows 10 does not have this limitation anymore.
2. I tried all the 3 existing USB ports and all result in the same error.
3. I installed the Windows 10 preview with the same Blueray burner on the same notebook. Why does the preview find the driver and the final not?

I came to the conclusion that this is -once more- a wrong error message. The cause must be elsewhere.

Then I made a very interesting test:

I booted from the same Windows 10 preview DVD that I installed a month ago. And voilá: It also does not boot anymore. But it gives another error:

On a black screen it tells me

CDBOOT: Couldn't find BOOTMGR

Missing OS

No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key.

How is it possible that the SAME DVD, that I installed successfully one month ago, now throws an error ?

Then I made a third test: I booted from the same Windows 8 DVD that I installed before. And this is the only DVD of the 3 DVDs where I get up to the menu which allows me to select the parition into which I want to install.

Summary:

1. Win 10 final DVD fails with one error
2. Win 10 preview DVD fails with another error, although it worked before!
3. Win 8 DVD runs correctly

It is clear that this is

1. Not a hardware problem: same notebook, same blueray burner, both Windows still run perfectly.
2. No driver is missing because both Windows were installed without problems before.
3. The DVDs are not burned wrongly, they worked before.

For me the only explanation is that the installation of Windows 8, which I installed after Windows 10 preview, destroyed anything on that computer.

Nevertheless both OS still run without problem, it is only the installation which is blocked.

But what has happened? Are there any diagnose tools? Has anybody seen such a strange thing before? Does anybody know a workaround (except deleting all partitions and starting from zero)?

Finally I solved the problem.

The cause of the error "A media driver your computer needs is missing" may be that the ISO image is corrupt. I did not expect that because I downloaded the entire 4 GB image directly from Microsoft without any error from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO

As Microsoft does not provide a hash you cannot verify the downloaded file.

After downloading the image from another place: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/techbench it worked.

ADDITION: Now I use a newer version of Firefox (43) which always shows an error if the download (first link above) was not successful. The Microsoft link for ISO download is garbage. I tried several times to download the ISO file (4 GB) and Firefox told me once that 13 MB were missing and the next time that 430 MB were missing. The Microsoft Server aborts the transmission shortly before you have downloaded the ISO file completely. So you MUST use the Media creation tool to download Windows 10! This tool requires at least Windows 7. Forget it to download Windows 10 with any other operating system than Windows 7 or 8. It is really a SHAME that Microsoft is not able to provide a download of an ISO file!

Another solution may be to copy the Windows ISO to an USB stick when you get this error message. You can use Rufus for that. It may solve this error in the case that the cause is a problem with your DVD/Blueray drive. Not all drives support UEFI.

In my case, the A media driver your computer needs is missing error was caused by incorrectly flashed .iso image on the USB flash drive.

The incorrectly flashed image, which booted just fine but later gave the error showed up as a single line in the boot menu, looking like this:

While the correctly flashed image showed up as two separate partitions, looking like this:

The image was incorrectly flashed using Linux Mint 19, with both the default USB Image Writer and WoeUSB, both with default settings.

It was correctly flashed with Rufus on Windows 10, also using the default settings.

With the correctly flashed image, I booted from the first of the two partitions, and the install completed without any issues. This was on an AMD Ryzen 1700 370X-PRO board running in UEFI mode with disabled Compatibility Support Module (CSM).