Windows 10: trying to install Win 10 after earlier installation failed

I think you would be much better following the steps provided in the Clean Install guide since 10 has already been on and activated once. The MS activation servers are where the hardware profile id tag and previous record of activation are stored along with your IP address. Oh yes! It's not displayed to anyone but part of the recording process server sites record showing what IPs and total number of visits overall as well as the activation being a record kept.

When you keep referring to sda and sdb you are still looking at how things are in a Linux distro or when going to use the Gnome Partition Editor most distros come with. In Windows terminology you need to get familiar with the first hard drive will be seen in the Disk Management tool as well as being at a command prompt window using the DiskPart tool as Disk 0 with your second drive you are using for Linux as Disk 1 which likely needs to be unplugged in order to restart the 10 install as that being the likely reason for seeing things hanging on you.

With 10 unlike most of the previous versions simply having any extra non MS OS type drives like storage and other drives plugged in confuses the 10 installer! The "Secure Boot" factor introduced with 8 is partially responsible for the newer versions from 7 mainly 8 and 8.1 not being dual boot or multi boot OS friendly. Try first unplugging all other hard drives by simply pulling out the data cable not the power cable or plug after first powering down to prevent any possible mishaps.

With those out of the loop the bios as well as 10 installer will only have one hard drive they will be looking at. Now by following the steps in the guide itself you will come to the two Upgrade by default and Custom options after you have first arrived at the Install Now screen. Once you select Custom the next screen will have the drive displayed where you then simply click on the new unless it is displaying two volumes already showing the 100mb System Reserved and Primary OS partitions were already created. Then all you need to do is hit the format option to clean the present mess off. The rest of the installation should go normally from that point on due to the other drives not being a problem.

 

It appears that the installation may have bellyflopped during the sysprep phase, since you at least have the windows 10 "Hero image" wallpaper, and the (excellently described!!) icons on the LHS of the taskbar:





So you are part way there - which offers little comfort, I know, but the situation may be recoverable.

You may try the "three fingered salute" - Ctrl+Alt+Del then tab and arrow key around (<Tab> <Down> <Down> <Enter>) to raise Task Manager, and with keyboard only, see what details and processes are going on, and maybe even run the task (<Alt>F then N) and type MSInfo32 <Tab> <Spacebar> <Enter>, and using <Tab> and arrow keys or <Shift> <Tab> etc to go back , you may even be able to save a report which may detail some problems. It may even be possible to take screenshots with <*Start>+<prtsc>, which you could later view with Linux and send here for any help we may be able to give, and which may highlight the way to proceed. One tip - proceed slowly - if the system is very slow due to CPU overrunning or throttling, you don't want to get ahead of the system, or things go haywire!

You may be able to run a reset from the boot menu advanced options, but I somehow doubt it will work.

I have had the experience where a clean install fails, but an upgrade to 10 from Windows 7 works on a PC with an older Processor, motherboard and expansion cards etc.

As you said, "The original Win 10 was an upgrade from W7 thru W8 thru W8.1.", so it may have had cached drivers from as early as possibly Vista or XP for your hardware, which just might have allowed the Upgrade to complete. If there were a backup for that earlier Windows installation around somewhere, you might try again, repeating your earlier success.

I would consider it beneficial to exclude or disable as many installed devices as possible and perform an isolated upgrade install - not connected to the internet - and there are certain conditions which the developers in Redmond probably never encounter beyond obsolete hardware, and so don't have a name or description for the bug - like coping with date and time, and numerical formats from outside the USA - leading to errors like "something happened", or "something went wrong", and worse, that never get back to the developers through telemetered error reporting. - but that will not apply to your case, Doug, in the USA.

 

Thanx, everybody. I'm not sure I will try again, but I _am_ pretty stubborn! Interestingly, about 2AM I moved the mouse, and a complete
Windows screen came up! So, I figured it finally installed, and I used the Start icon to do a restart. No luck. The Window and the little
circular worm came up for about 10 seconds and everything went black. And it has stored something in memory beyond reboot--I have
to disconnect power in order to do anything at all, at which point the failure scenario recurs.
--doug

 

Have you reviewed the guides at all? You might be able to slide by with a repair install if the initial try there went far enough to get things situated to where they are supposed even while the installation hung up on something this time around. But keep in mind the presence of any other drive could be the main problem as the temp install folders as well as boot files can end up in the wrong places causing an upgrade as well as clean install to fail.

All isn't lost simply because you ran into a glitch of some type! This is why there are guides for this. *Smile

 

I cleaned one drive completely with DBAN. I formatted it with a 100MB boot partition and a 118GiB system partition,
both formatted to NTSF. Then I started the downloaded iso disk. I kept a record of what happened as time went on, but
it is not helpful. The process never came to a useful end, and after around four hours the machine turned off and never
restarted. It still had something in memory that would prevent it from booting,. I turned the machine back on, with and without the disk in the drive, but the only sign of life was an arrow cursor on a black screen, and not even a disk activity
light blinking. This machine will never see Windows again, that's obvious. I'm not THAT stubborn!

--doug

 

Nothing is in memory, and nothing on the disk could cause your setup problem, Doug. Having had Windows 10 running following an upgrade, your machine is just incapable of a clean install, with all the current hardware attached, unless the right drivers are made available to the Windows Setup. It has and it could upgrade a working Windows system again.

Windows setup on a system with too much problem hardware is like starting to learn to drive your first car with a large trailer attached - an unnecessary burden when just the basics would make the process less troublesome.

The problem is that Windows 10 setup is badly equipped with drivers for older Intel chipsets like your G41 and ICH7, with Intel 4500 GMA VGA graphics on Die. The graphics drivers need to run in compatibility mode on Windows 10.

Download Intel 7*, 8.1*,10 [15.33]

But there's a second graphics adapter in the picture - surely if the first one fails, the second will work, won't it?

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is probably also failing because Windows 10 is forcing more recent Nvidia Geforce drivers on your system than the latest working version for that age of adapter made for Windows 8.1 :

Version: 350.12 WHQL Release Date: 2015.4.13 Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit, Windows 8.1 64-bit, Windows 8 64-bit, Windows Vista 64-bit Language: English (US) File Size: 270.08 MB


But, you're right, you won't get that sort of problem with Linux.

However, a sufficiently tenacious Windows enthusiast would get your system running 10, and probably better than it ever did with previous Windows versions *Smile

Windows 10 is marking the end of the line for some hardware because Microsoft is drawing the line on the past (it doesn't want the ghost of XP hanging around any more). That doesn't mean Windows 10 setup is bad - it's just limited, and probably deliberately so.

 

Forget that board entirely! Foxconn Support - Download


The newest version was Vista/ 7 x64 and only sees USB 2.0 ports. The most you could do is run 10 on a VM other then a quick temp install for a fast look since there won't be any 8, 8.1 drivers let alone anything for 10. The board was also discontinued about 4-5yrs. back.