Question WD Blue SA510 SSD will not allow windows 7 installation after running gparted

kn4hh

Commendable
Jun 2, 2020
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I have a Western Digital Blue SA510 SSD installed in my Asus PC with i7 processor and 12gb ram. I wanted to wipe the drive clean for a new installation of Windows 7 as my backup PC. The drive always operated properly.
I ran gparted to delete the partitions on the drive (old hard drive mentality) and reinstall an OS. After I ran gparted, the Windows 7 install disk recognized the SSD. However, soon after the install process , an error message appears stating that all windows files are not present And to restart the installation. I tried two different installation media and get the same results. I had a spare small San disk SSD and the installation went flawless on it.

Have I damaged the drive or is there a process to restore the drive.

Thanks for any suggestions,
Bob W
 
My system is a Asus CM6850 tower pc which uses an Intel i7-6700 cpu, 12gb ram, using onboard video, audio, and nic, Western Digital Blue SA510 SSD, Samsung 40" monitor.
 
I don't use a photo hosting service so I will attempt to tell you what DMDE is reporting

Syetem Reserved Found NTFS 105 MB BCF 2 048 1 953 525 167 <-- the end LBA should be 206 847 ???
$Noname 02 found NTFS 1.00 TB BCF 206 848 1 953 521 663

It seems that DMDE found your old partitions. Sector 0 appears to have been cleared, which is as expected after running GParted.

Do you need to partition your drive before installing Windows 7, or is the installer supposed to do this for you?
 
It seems that DMDE found your old partitions. Sector 0 appears to have been cleared, which is as expected after running GParted.

Do you need to partition your drive before installing Windows 7, or is the installer supposed to do this for you?
My Windows 7 Install media does see the drive and creates a partition. Then the installation starts. In a minute or so, en error message appears stating that all files necessary for installation are not present. On my experiment using another ssd, I did not encounter any problems doing a complete installation.
 
My Windows 7 Install media does see the drive and creates a partition. Then the installation starts. In a minute or so, en error message appears stating that all files necessary for installation are not present. On my experiment using another ssd, I did not encounter any problems doing a complete installation.
What type of partition identifier does each of the ssds have; MBR or GPT? Since its Windows 7 I don't remember which type it preferred so you could check the identifier of the successful ssd and see if the problem ssd is different, and if so change it to match the successful ssd.
 
WD does have drive zeroing utilities for returning a drive to the factory out-of-the-box condition. Given that you have no OS installed, the DOS version is suggested, after you boot to a DOS boot CD or USB.

Do keep in mind that you should be booting from the USB 2.0 ports on your computer, since vanilla Windows 7 does not include drivers for the Asmedia USB 3.0 chip. What happens is the installer will switch from BIOS to generic USB driver during the installation, and since this driver does not work with the Asmedia, suddenly all of the files on the USB become inaccessible to it.

Or you could just boot from a Windows 7 DVD instead.
 
Yes, both the WD Blue and San Disk are SATA III.
I wanted to report that I was able to recover the SSD by using AOMEI Partition Assistant. I used their Clean Drive option which recovered the drive and is now back in service.
Sorry for all the bandwidth. Thanks so much for all the comments.
Bob W.