Windows 10: I can't boot from any media to do the clean install

I am sure it will work. I have done it numerous times with Win7.

It is also the same way many oem recovery partitions work,

 

Thanks. I'm not quite understanding why I need the partition for the installation files if the USB ports work. Could I boot to the command prompt then run setup.exe from the USB stick without needing to create a separate partition for the installation files? I could even copy the drivers to the USB stick, although I don't think I'll need them.

 

The tutorial I linked to was made out of my own personal needs, as I explain in the very beginning of it:



Information Sometime ago I had an interesting dilemma: A Windows tablet simply refused to upgrade from Windows 10 version 1607, the Anniversary Update. Due my own actions the only USB port was broken, not recognizing any USB flash drives. I had no SD cards available and even if I had found one, Windows installation can't be booted from SD card. In addition, to get more storage space I had removed factory restore partition and extended C: drive to that freed space.

I wanted to clean install wiping the hard disk (removing and recreating Windows partitions). I knew from earlier experience that when clean installed, although Windows 10 usually is pretty good in finding and installing correct drivers, setup would be unable to find correct network drivers for this device (a tablet with Intel Atom CPU). These drivers would need to be manually installed after the installation. Otherwise the tablet would be just a worthless brick, a Windows device without network / Internet access, no way to add and install them and therefore unable to install rest of the drivers.

Short: I had to find a way to install without any external media, and be sure installers for network drivers would be available after installation.

Of course in your case when your PC can read USB and you already have install files on it, you can skip the part of copying install files. There's no need for that. Just boot to Command Prompt and run setup from USB, using the Setup.exe on root of it.

The same with copying driver installers as told in tutorial, that part of the tutorial is only to be sure that if there's no way to use external USB device to transfer device drivers after installation in case Windows cannot install network drivers and therefore can't find network, you can at least install network drivers to connect to Internet to download rest of the drivers.

 

Of course in your case when your PC can read USB and you already have install files on it, you can skip the part of copying install files. There's no need for that. Just boot to Command Prompt and run setup from USB, using the Setup.exe on root of it.

The same with copying driver installers as told in tutorial, that part of the tutorial is only to be sure that if there's no way to use external USB device to transfer device drivers after installation in case Windows cannot install network drivers and therefore can't find network, you can at least install network drivers to connect to Internet to download rest of the drivers.

Kari Thanks. I booted to the command prompt but of course I'm still running a 32 bit version of windows and setup.exe won't clean install the 64 bit version of Windows. I need to boot from a DVD running a 64 bit recovery environment or find a way of getting the DVD created by the Creation Tool to boot. Back to square one!

 

@Steve C is your PC BIOS or UEFI?

 

It's an old non-UEFI BIOS.

To recap:

• I want to clean install Windows 10 x64 over the current Windows x32 installation
• My old PC doesn't boot from USB sticks nor does it boot from DVDs made by the Media Creation Tool
• PLOP Boot Manager doesn't work on the PC for some reason
• Restarting to a command prompt to run setup.exe for a 64 bit installation fails since the PC is still running 32 bit Windows

I've found this cunning solution:

• I can boot the Windows 8 x64 installation DVD I bought in 2012!
• Select Repair Your Computer
• This takes me to a command prompt from where I can run setup.exe from the USB stick or Windows 10 DVD. I have to run the setup.exe from the Sources folder else the Windows 8 setup.exe runs.
• Windows 10 x64 setup.exe runs and I can choose Custom Installation from where I can clean the disk and proceed with the Windows 10 installation

I'll do the installation tomorrow since I've spent most of today working out the above. I still can't work out why DVDs produced by the Media Creation Tool won't boot on old PCs.

 

Another solution is to have the windows 10 installation files in a partition on hard drive and create a boot entry using Kyhi's tools here

Windows 10 Help Forums

You will need to install 7zip also.

Download

 

I'm unconvinced that the A8N-SLI cannot be booted from a USB stick. (I should remember, because I used to own one. However, I handed the machine down, and it has since died.) A little Web searching finds posts from people who claim to have done it.

With the PC powered down, and the USB drive plugged in, press the F8 hotkey. That will bring up a boot menu that allows you to choose a boot device. (It's a one time choice. I've preferred that to changing the BIOS settings.) I'm not sure how the USB drive would appear; perhaps as "removable".

Just for luck, make sure that the USB drive is formatted as FAT32. FAT would be required for a UEFI installation. It may not be required for an old BIOS, but it should do no harm.

 

I've been using the F8 key boot override on my A8N-SLI motherboard. The USB stick does appear as a hard drive but no bootable USB stick I tried has worked. A Google search did not indicate anyone had success booting from them. Remember USB memory sticks were relatively uncommon in the dark ages of 2004.

 

I've now tried installing the 64 bit version of Windows 10 by booting my Windows 8 x64 DVD then running setup.exe. I've tried the clean install by running setup.exe from USB stick and DVD but in both cases the PC just hangs with the blue Windows logo at the start of the first reboot. I also installed Windows 7 x64 and tried a clean install of Windows 10 x64 from there but hit the same problem.

All approaches fail at the same point i.e. the PC hangs after the first reboot. I'm installing on a minimal system as I did when I installed Windows 10 32 bit. I welcome any advice on overcoming this installation hurdle.

 

Is the BIOS updated to the latest version?
Go back to 32-bit Windows.

 

I have the latest BIOS for that old motherboard but of course ASUS haven't updated it for ages. It could be a BIOS issue which affects the 64 bit installation only. If so, I'll admit defeat.

I have the 32 bit installation backed up using Reflect but I'm interested in the technical challenge of making the 64 bit version work on old hardware.

 

I thought that might be the case. I know not to expect people to post everything they've tried.

I'm not completely confident of this, but I believe that your Athlon 64 CPU may lack the CMPXCHG16b feature, which is one of the obscure requirements for 64 bit Windows 8.1 and 10. If that is the case, you're basically stuck with X86 (32 bit). There are supposed to be hacks to work around that, but I've never used them.

 

I spotted the CPU instruction requirement and my CPU is OK confirmed by Coreinfo. I checked my CPU does support Physical Address Extension (PAE), No-eXecute (NX), Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2) and the CMPXCHG16b (CX16) feature.

I found a few useful threads with people reporting the same problem I have. Some were successful with the A8N-SLI and Windows 10 x64. A consistent but strange solution is to change the hypertransport (HTT) setting from 'Auto' which I have to 1x for the installation which would seriously underclock the CPU and memory. Will try tomorrow.

 

Just to chip in here, I agree with @bobkn in that this board can definitely support booting from a USB stick. I installed Windows 8 on a PC based on this motherboard by using a USB stick. Seems very odd that you can't boot off them, have you tried resetting the BIOS's USB options to their defaults? (if they've ever been changed that is)