RAID Driver Issues During Windows 11 (24H2) Fresh Installation

Yeah this one is a known pain point with 24H2 on Meteor Lake business laptops, you're not alone. The combination of VMD enabled and the newer 24H2 installer architecture is what's biting you, and the 20.2.4.1019 VMD driver from that specific Dell driver pack has been reported as flaky during 24H2 Setup. A few things worth trying in order of effort.

First and easiest, check Dell's support site for your service tag and see if there's a BIOS newer than 1.15.1 and a WinPE driver pack newer than YJ49J / A07. Dell pushed out updated driver packs and BIOS revisions on several Latitude models specifically targeting 24H2 install issues with VMD. The Drivers and Downloads page under Operating System set to Windows 11 24H2 is where the new pack will show up if it exists for the 5450.

Second, instead of using Dell's repackaged WinPE driver pack, try grabbing the VMD driver directly from Intel. They publish the F6 floppy version on their RST/VMD download page and that build sometimes loads cleanly when the Dell repackaged one fails. You want the latest production build, not the 20.2.4.1019 you've already tested.

If the driver still won't load through the Setup UI, slipstreaming is the most reliable fix. Mount boot.wim and install.wim from your ISO and use DISM /Add-Driver against both before writing the USB. That puts the VMD driver in place before Setup ever runs, so any Setup side bugs around the Load Driver dialog go away entirely. This is what most deployment teams are doing as a stopgap on this exact issue.

Fast workaround if you just need the machine running today, go into BIOS and switch the storage mode from RAID On to AHCI, then reinstall. 24H2 installs cleanly with the inbox NVMe driver in AHCI mode, no third party drivers needed. The trade off is you lose Intel RST features, and you can't just flip the switch on an already installed system without breaking boot, you would need the safe boot regedit trick first. On a fresh install with AHCI already selected though, no issues.

Last resort but most reliable for a one off, Dell OS Recovery Tool builds a Windows image tied to your specific service tag with the correct driver stack baked in. Not great for volume deployment, but on a single problem machine it gets you running while you sort the wider deployment image.

The fact that 23H2 deploys cleanly and 24H2 doesn't is the giveaway that it's the new installer interacting with VMD rather than a hardware fault, so once an updated driver pack lands for 24H2 the problem should go away on its own.