Question Windows 10 iso bootable usb drive stuck booting on an old system.

[tandlion13]

So, I have this system consisting of old components listed below.

CPU : Intel Xeon E5450 (Core 2 Quad Q9650 LGA 775 equivalent if I'm not mistaken)
Motherboard : ASUS P5Q-VM (Latest bios version from ASUS website installed)
RAM : 4 sticks of Kingston 2GB DDR2-800 CL5 1.8V. (The short stick ones)
HDD : An old Hitachi 320GB 7200rpm SATA
Graphics Card : Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce GT 220 2GB DDR3
PSU : FSP Hexa+ 550w (Dual 18A 12V rails, plenty for this kinda system I guess)
All this in an old unspecified case.

I'm trying to clean install Windows 10 Pro x64 onto this system. And all the components have been tried and tested to be working just fine with the OS. The system has been working perfectly as of last month. But I have to swap out the old HDD it was running on due to change of usage scenarios. Now the current HDD in the system has the same OS installed from another machine. But it won't boot on this system. If I'm trying to boot into the old OS, the system will enter a restart loop. So I have to reinstall it.

I have created a Windows iso bootable usb drive using rufus 3.6, the latest version as of today. The file system used is for legacy non-UEFI boot in NTFS format that is known to has been working on this kind of system. I've been installing the OS on another similar system using this method before and it worked. And this newly created usb drive is bootable on another working system.

Now when I try to boot into the drive on this system. It stuck loading at the blue Windows logo on the black background screen. As most system shouldn't take more than 5 minutes or so here. I kept this one running for hours and nothing happened. It just stuck there. Tried messing around with some bios settings like SATA configuration (IDE & AHCI), boot device priority, etc. But nothing helped.

So with the given situation. What should I look into? What could have been the problem?
The HDD in the system still have the old OS installed on it. Should I try to format it first?

Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Does this system have an optical drive? Some older systems handle booting from DVD better than from USB, so I would try using Rufus to write the ISO to a DVD.

If your system does not have an optical drive, try creating the USB via Microsofts Media creation tool.

 

[tandlion13]

I figured as much. Well, there's no optical drive installed in the system currently but I do have the spare drives on hand should need be. But as you can see I didn't use them in a long time and I wouldn't want to mess around with buying and burning some discs I'd rarely use. And since I know that the usb method was worked in a system like this before. There's no apparent reason it wouldn't work this time.

With that being said, I suspected that there might be something wrong on my system's end. And thus the optical drive method might wouldn't even work if that still be the case.

Anyway I will try the Microsoft tool you suggested, see how it fares. And I'll keep the optical drive option in mind if there's nothing else I could do.

 

[tandlion13]

Alright, after failing several other desperate attempts to get the bootable usb drive to work. I finally tried using the optical drive instead.

And as I expected, that doesn't work too. The exact same thing happened. The system recognized the drive and was booting. But it stuck at the loading screen before the Windows installation would have started.

I tried clearing the CMOS, re-flashing the motherboard bios and do it all over again. Still, nothing worked. Nearly breaking them all apart and start building from scratch but I doubt that would help.

I think there's something wrong with the system that prevents the operating system to start. But I'm not sure what I'm dealing with here.

So, what should I do next. Any ideas?

As a side note. I'm pretty confident that all the components are working properly. But I'll try testing it one by one to be sure. Putting the hard drive in another working system would be a start I guess.

 

[tandlion13]

After a bit of work, I'm now able to identify the issue. It's been the CPU afterall. (Xeon E5450) That's it. I mean there CPU is not faulty or anything but. It was the only reason the operating system won't be able to load no matter what has been done. Tho I have another system with Xeon E5472, almost exactly the same thing but working on Win 10 Pro x64 without a single problem.

Anyway I think this thread can now be closed cus I have to find a solution by other means.
Thanks remixislandmusic for trying to help tho.

I saw there are quite a few threads out there where people were having the same problem as I am now. The exact same CPU regardless of other system configurations. I think I'll start looking from there. Hopefully I could find some sort of fix if that is possible at all.