How to remove Intel VMD without reinstalling Windows

Turn off VMD and get faster boot times!If you have an 11th generation or newer Intel processor, your system might be using Intel VMD.

VMD, or Volume Management Device, is a server-ish bit of technology where your processor more or less “hijacks” the management of NVMe disk drives in your puter.

When VMD is enabled, you MUST use Intel’s RST drivers – even just to do a clean install of Windows 11.

Well, what happens if you got your puter and it’s using VMD, but you want to remove it?

Easy!

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NVMe drive missing or not booting? There’s a simple fix!

NVMe inaccessible boot deviceOn the one hand, NVMe drives are blazingly fast. On the other hand, getting them to work with Windows – or even your BIOS – can be a bit of a nightmare.

I recently upgraded several computers that had SATA SSDs. I wanted to upgrade each one to an NVMe drive.

So, I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager and just copied the SATA C: to the new NVMe drive, upgraded the hardware in each puter, and then tried to boot: NO DICE!

Windows 10 kept giving me a blue screen at boot with the message: INACESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.

Worse yet, it seemed the BIOS/UEFI wouldn’t even detect the NVMe drive properly. WTH?!

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