Windows installation doesn't detect drive, BIOS and Parted Magic does

Setup:

• Intel NUC today (model DN2820FYKH)
• Value Kingston 8GB DDR3L
• Samsung SSD 840 EVO

It starts up okay, BIOS reports correct amount of RAM as well as connected drives.

I followed Intel recommended BIOS settings:

• AHCI mode
• Legacy boot disabled
• UEFI compatibility Windows 8.x

I went ahead and booted from my Windows 8.1 installation USB. However at a step, where I should choose partition/drive for install, the list is empty with error that it could not find a drive.

So I booted from my other USB stick to Parted Magic and it detected drive successfully. I could do normal operations with drive (recreated partition table, create partitions, etc.).

Steps I tried to troubleshoot:

• Changing UEFI compatibility to Win7 and tried Windows 7 installation, but it's same issue there as well.
• Various versions of BIOS
• Changing to IDE mode, then disk appeared but I would get error when trying to use clean in diskpart (DiskPart has encountered an error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.)
• Replaced SSD with Intel's 310 series 120GB. Even in AHCI mode, Windows detected it. But when I tried clean -> cre par pri -> for quick fs=ntfs it throwed error during formating (Disk Part has encountered an error: the parameter is incorrect). If I let Windows format it during setup by simply clicking next would halt for few minutes and then throw error 0x80070057 and after refresh I could see Windows created 300MB restore and 100MB system partition and rest was unallocated.

One interesting thing to note is that I could see the drive few times in Windows installation, but whenever I tried to remove or create partition, it would just halt (endless wait cursor) but computer still responded. Strangely, I was able to create a partition and install Windows just once, but as I removed USB stick at the end of installation and let it boot for the first time, it would just throw blue error message with error code 0x00085.

Parted Magic does detect the drive successfully every time, and I can do operations with the drive very easily, so that should indicate it's not hardware issue, but a software.

These symptoms sound like the machine you've got has a motherboard chipset that's more recent than Windows 8.1. This sort of problem is fairly common, and the solution is to download drivers for the chipset (or at least for the disk subsystem) from the manufacturer. I just checked, and Intel has quite a few Windows drivers for that computer here:

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/78953/Intel-NUC-Kit-DN2820FYKH

If I'm right, you'll need the "driver bundle" or "chipset device software" package. You should extract the package and put the drivers on an external medium. You can then load them when the Windows installer prompts for such things.

Alternatively, you could try a Windows 10 beta, which probably has more recent drivers. Microsoft provides a free download here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-iso

You'll need to update it once it's released.