Windows 10: My PC detects my USB flash stick in BIOS menu, but I can't open it!

Help...

:)

 

open USB

Hello,

When using a USB flash drive, no additional cables or adapters are required. To answer your query, you may refer to the steps below on how to open a USB flash drive:

• Plug your USB flash drive into an available USB port on your computer.
• The drive will appear as a removable disk and will bring up a window showing the memory stick is now seen as a drive on your computer.
  You will also get a menu or options to use the device.
  
• Select Open folder to view files.

For further queries, feel free to post back.

 

Install Windows 10 from USB stick on legacy BIOS PC

I am struggling to install Windows 10 on an old PC (equipped with GA P35-DS3L motherboard, which has BIOS, no UEFI), from a USB stick.

Try 1:

1. Using Microsoft Media Creation Tool, create bootable USB flash drive
   
2. Boot to this drive (F12 at boot)
   

Result: Windows setup does not launch. Instead, BIOS throws error Invalid Partition Table

My guess: the Windows tool is simply not compatible with BIOS systems, as it creates a GPT instead of a MBR.

Try 2:

1. Download the ISO using Media Creation Tool
   
2. Create a bootable USB
   drive from this ISO using Rufus (checking the "MBR" option).
   

Result: setup launches successfully, but I cannot get past the "partition selection" step.

Whenever I select an empty space (or a valid partition freshly created on my system HDD), I get error: We couldn’t create a new partition or locate an existing one. For more information, see the Setup log files.

I have also tried using diskpart to create a new primary partition (disk 0 clean create partition primary active format fs=ntfs quick assign).
The error was the same when trying to install Windows on it.

My guess: the USB stick might be confusing Windows, which would see it as a HDD and try to install on it (?)

I have tried with 2 sticks (one USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0), same results.

How can I solve this?

 

Installing windows off of a USB stick

Step By Step from vista:
From admin cmd prompt

1. diskpart
1a. list disk
2. select disk 1 (replace 1 with your usb drive)
3. clean
4. create partition primary
5. select partition 1 (replace 1 with your usb drive)
6. active
7. format fs=fat32
8. assign
9. exit

Copy Windows Vista's DVD ROM content to the Flash Drive

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\ (d being your vista cd and e being your usb stick)

And that's it, boot off your usb disk