Question Re-installing Windows 10 has been a struggle !

[vince_FL]

Hi,

What should have been a straight forward win 10 ISO install has turned into 12 hr bad movie....need some help...missing something??

What I have done so far-

1. downloaded official fresh ISO Of win 10 from official MS site.
2. downloaded official MS media creation tool.
3. made bootable ISO on flash drives 1 and 2. (both drives healthy)

4) PC [Asus MB 2009] bios recognized both flash drives by name, moved each to_top boot priority spot in the Bios...BIOS would not boot the flash drives. Show blinking cursor black screen.

Moved the flash drives to various USB slots, same deal no boot up.

5) reformatted flash drives as ntfs, fat32, same deal no boot up..
At this point gave up on flash drive boot for install.

6) tried blu-ray disc next, powerISO made bootable image win 10 x64.. poweriso says successful!
Move CD-ROM drive #1 priority...result no boot up..

All these trials steps 1-6 above, had BIOS storage controller in legacy mode...

Side note- My 2009 PC that has had win 10 on it for 9 months. (home built machine, working fine until a hard disk where the win 10 resided started to give issues.

One ray of hope....I now have 3 relatively new SSD drives in the PC, and one older 2009 rapter drive...(drive #4)

7) I used Win-to_USB or MS creation dont recall to make rapter drive bootable win 10 ISO...

1. the PC now contains 4 drives, 3 newer Sata SSD drives plus1 older rapter drive..
2. I changed boot priority to rapter, , BIOS recognized the rapter, and installed win 10 pro x64!!!

I had disconnected power to the other SSD's and just left power on the rapter and the target SSD I wanted win 10 OS installed. Make it dummy proof for windows to install!
at first success!!.....win 10 installed....not so fast....the ISO installer asked me where I wanted OS installed, I selected the new SSD drive.
MS ended up installing the boot partition is on old rapter drive and windows OS ion the new SSD????????

Since it appears flash drive and DVD/blu-ray disc boot OS install options are on the table..my only path is internal hard disk.
Can I force windows to install the MBR and the OS on the new SSD? if yes how?

any thought/suggestions would be appreciated
is tied to GPT formatted or??

Final goal- to end up clean win 10 x64 install ( all of it on one SSD), remove the rapter drive, re-connect SSD 2 and SSD 3. done..........

thanks Vince

 

[Ralston18]

Start over.

Start here:

https://forums.tomshardware.com/faq/windows-10-clean-install-tutorial.3170366

 

[vince_FL]

I reviewed the procedure in the link...will re-do per procedure, the odd thing is not being able to boot via flash drive and DVD....resorting to hard disk internal.
will report back..
thanks\
Vince

 

[BFG-9000]

is tied to GPT formatted or??

It sure is. You have to run the Media Creation tool on a Legacy BIOS computer or it will produce a GPT formatted USB stick which cannot boot on a Legacy BIOS computer--since that can boot MBR only. A computer of that vintage may also have difficulty with booting a 64GB+ stick so 16GB or 32GB are the most compatible. And you shouldn't have to select Fat32 unless you are using a 3rd-party bootable USB maker like Rufus--the Media Creation tool should do this automatically.

ATAPI doesn't have a GPT vs. MBR issue but a blu-ray disc cannot be read by a CD-Rom drive. Neither can a DL DVD. If your burner is USB you could try that but it might not boot BD-R either, seeing how that did not actually become popular until after 2009.

Best bet is to put the Raptor in an external USB dock and boot from that. Windows will not put the boot partition on an external drive

 

[TerryLaze]

Since it appears flash drive and DVD/blu-ray disc boot OS install options are on the table..my only path is internal hard disk.
Can I force windows to install the MBR and the OS on the new SSD? if yes how?

any thought/suggestions would be appreciated
is tied to GPT formatted or??

Final goal- to end up clean win 10 x64 install ( all of it on one SSD), remove the rapter drive, re-connect SSD 2 and SSD 3. done..........

thanks Vince

Just connect the target ssd to a working system and do the following.
Use imagex to transfer the installation.wim from a installation usb/dvd to a hdd/sdd so that the installation will be done on the target system.

All you need is imagex, you can download gigabytes of stuff from MS to get it,or you can search for imagex alone on the web.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744531(v=ws.10).aspx

The only command needed is this one.
(Of course you'll have to make sure that the drive has an active and bootable partition)
imagex /apply N:\Images\my-windows-partition.wim 1 W:\
All you have to do is change the drive letters, if your dvd or mounted iso is D:
and the target hdd/ssd is E:
you use
imagex /apply D:\sources\install.wim 1 E:

Make triple sure that you use the proper drive letter for the target, all data on that disk will be destroyed.

The following part is to figure out what version to install.
Type cmd on the search bar and run command
the 1 at the end tells it which list item to use.
If you have a dvd with multiple versions you can use
dism /Get-WimInfo /WimFile:F:\x86\sources\install.esd /index:1(2-3... )
to see which is which.
Optional, after it applied the image make a folder with all the drivers on the ssd so they will be available to you after it finished installing and booted up and your done.

First make sure to make the drive primary and active so that it will start up when you put it into the other system.
You can do that from windows disk management or with cmd diskpart.
Or any partition manager you feel comfortable with.

 

[vince_FL]

BFG , Terry and Ralston,

Thanks for the guidance..Imagex is powerful..never knew of it. Rufus did the trick.

Thanks to all.
Vince