windows cannot be installed to this disk. this computer's hardware may not support booting to disk

[gspot1218]

I'm trying to install Windows 10 clean install on my laptop via USB. I've gotten to the point where I'm configuring the hard drive and I got the message in the title "Windows cannot be installed to this disk"

I then deleted the existing hard drive and had roughly a TB of unallocated space. Created a new partition and formatted only to get the same message.

Background:
Purchased an HP Elitebook 8460p a month ago running Win7 Pro. Can't quite remember how it was running when I first started it up. I upgraded to 10 a little over a week ago using window's upgrade. Immediately I felt it was running really slowly. I have 10 on a desktop which runs really smoothly. I checked and found that the laptop was consistently running at 100% disk usage. I looked up and tried various different fixes to the 100% disk usage problem including removing BITS and superfetch.

I felt that maybe there was a problem with Win 10 on the laptop so I used the native revert to 7 program in windows 10. I found that even in 7, the computer was running terribly slow. I decided to just do a clean install of 10 and here is where I am now.

Specs:
Intel Core i5
8GB DDR3 SDRAM
1TB HDD

I've read other threads here and elsewhere regarding the SATA device mode changing from IDE to AHCI. I just checked and it is already set at AHCI.

Because this is a laptop, I haven't messed with any physical hardware at all.

 

[smorizio]

windows is looking for an empty drive with no partions on it. when windows installs it self it will make the partions it needs (system and data partions). go into the advance mode and delete all of them then let windows install itself onto a blank drive.

 

[gspot1218]

windows is looking for an empty drive with no partions on it. when windows installs it self it will make the partions it needs (system and data partions). go into the advance mode and delete all of them then let windows install itself onto a blank drive.

I will not bring you Solo nor the wookie, but I thought about just hitting next. Thanks for the incredibly quick response. I'll try after I'm done running the HDD Self-Test.