Since I just spent most of a weekend fighting with the error "a media driver your computer needs is missing" when trying to do a fresh install of Windows 10 on an Acer TC-885 and I don't want anyone to ever suffer the same fate as me...
It turns out that the issue was the Windows 10 installer USB media I was using.
I had downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft and written it to the USB stick with the dd utility on my Mac. It booted. It walked through the Windows Setup at least partially, so it never occurred to me that it was faulty. But when it came time to choose a disk to install Windows on, it failed to detect the SATA drives.
I tried providing every possible storage driver I could find on the Acer support site, but none of them appeased the installer.
Finally I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BBNeGbmQIE which made me think that perhaps there really was something wrong with my installer media.
So I created a brand new Windows 10 Virtual Machine (in VirtualBox) on my Mac. Using the same ISO that was on the failing USB stick, I might add.
Then, using the Windows 10 VM, I ran the official Microsoft Windows Media Creation Tool to re-write the Windows 10 installation media to a different USB stick. (I don't think the problem was the USB stick itself, but I wasn't taking any chances.)
Anyway, the officially created installation media worked.
The lessons here, as far as I can tell:
- DON'T use dd to create Windows Installer USB sticks.
- DO use the official Windows Media Creation Tool.
