PC Brain Dead?

Pavel_14

Prominent
May 8, 2017
9
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So I found an old HDD and plugged it into my current PC for 2 extra TB. When I turned on my PC it wouldn't boot and gave me the message "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot Device and press a key." When I looked up how to fix this I came across an article where the persons final solution which worked was reinstalling Windows. So I throw the windows tool on to a flash drive and book up my PC. I get through alright until I hit the point asking to install the advanced or normal version. Knowing I wanted all my personalizations. Here I came across the problem; Not enough space. This left me with one option, format. So I format the SSD (which really annoyed me that I had to do this just because of an HDD) and when I then tried to put it there since I had space it said it was a GPT drive. I don't even know what the hell that is! I tried restarting my PC and going into my bios to see if it was still in UEFI because it always worked before now (because this is how I first got my windows) and everything was fine. I leave bios and it boots to my flash drive where once I get into the windows install it doesn't get past the purple screen and stays there. I don't know how the hell I got to this because all I did was put in a HDD and this happened. Some help would be greatly appreciated, and fast because I need it up and running soon. Thanks a lot!
 
Solution
Did you try to remove hdd and see if PC worked without it? Its too late now but its likely the hdd change had messed up the boot order and removing drive again may have fixed it.

Did PC have win 7 on it before you put Win 10 on? reason I ask is it uses MBR partition format and Windows 10 would have seen that your PC is UEFI and seen the drive was formatted as MBR. If you fresh install win 10 it wants to use GPT but because that message is written by Martians it can't just tell you what to do. If message were written in English it would say, to install win 10 on this drive, you need to wipe all the partitions and click next.

remove all drives except the ssd while installing windows 10 as it might try to put parts of itself on other...
Did you try to remove hdd and see if PC worked without it? Its too late now but its likely the hdd change had messed up the boot order and removing drive again may have fixed it.

Did PC have win 7 on it before you put Win 10 on? reason I ask is it uses MBR partition format and Windows 10 would have seen that your PC is UEFI and seen the drive was formatted as MBR. If you fresh install win 10 it wants to use GPT but because that message is written by Martians it can't just tell you what to do. If message were written in English it would say, to install win 10 on this drive, you need to wipe all the partitions and click next.

remove all drives except the ssd while installing windows 10 as it might try to put parts of itself on other drives.

how far into installer does it get? is purple screen the 1st screen? what happens if you hit Shift F10?
if that brings up the command prompt, lets wipe ssd and start again
type diskpart and press enter
type list disk and press enter
this shows all drives available, DVD/USB and hdd, make note of hdd number
type Select disk X - where X is the number of the hdd you want to wipe, change X to that number and press enter
once the drive you want to install on is chosen, type Clean
type exit and restart Installer and try again.

follow this guide: http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1950-windows-10-clean-install.html

when you reach the screen asking for licence, click "I don't have a key" and win 10 will continue to install and reactivate once finished
 
Solution


I do not have time at the moment to test this but thank you so much in advance. I will do what you say tomorrow and tell you what happens.

Thanks!

 


Wow. I could not be more thankful. I was thinking about taking my PC to Best buy to see if any of the super computer geeks could help. This helped so much and seems to have worked. Thanks a lot and if I ever need help I think I will contact you!