Cause of the Missing CD/DVD drivers issue?

I was starting the process of doing a clean install on my wife's new Dell Inspiron 15R laptop, and I ran into this issue. During the install process, I got the "missing CD/DVD drivers" error when it should have shown her hard drive.

The BIOS was updated, and the controller was set to AHCI. I even had gone in an blanked the disk using the clean all command. I tried leaving the drive blank, and I tried creating a 200 GB partition in DISKPART, with no change. I was using a flash drive to do the install...one I've used dozens of times already without issue. My discs were in my office at work, so I ended up downloading a Home Premium SP1 .iso from TechNet and using that. it worked fine, but it still bugs me why my known-good USB flash drive encountered this issue.

For laughs, I booted from the flash drive this morning at work on my Latitude E6400 and it worked fine.

The issue is almost always with the installer, since the SATA controller drivers are all in the installer. Only really old IDE controllers need Adding.

In your case it could be an idiosyncracy with the flash stick installer since a DVD install worked. Did you use the most reliable method Universal USB Installer?

I used the Windows USB drive tool available on the MyDigitalRiver site. I haven't had a single issue using this flash drive before on any other computer.