Adding new SSD and HDD to Pavilion HPE-257c with no HDD and no OS

[ReyElite]

Howdy. I received a Pavilion Elite HPE-257c (64 bit) from a cousin-in-law. Box has no SSD nor HDD. I just bought a 1TB SSD and 4TB HDD for box even though it does not support Win11 but looking to trying the solution proposed by Paul_Tikkanen...

So base question is after installing SSD and HDD how do I format them? I'm accustomed to formatting HDD w/DOS during the "old" days but haven't obtained a USB floppy drive to run my ancient DOS disks 8-)

Do not recall if BIOS on boot will display msg like "No boot disk" - been a long time - and allow me to format SSD as boot disk from an Win10 disk created from ISO file?

My thoughts on "new" box not being able to support Win11 is to install Win10 Pro and add VirtualBox with a Linux Mint/Ubuntu distro onto the SSD and use the HDD as data drive. I installed VirtualBox w/Linux distro on another box but haven't played w/it to browse Net or installed VS Code, et al.

Appreciate your thoughts/suggestion on this matter. Thank you, Rey

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi, Rey:

Ask your cousin if he had upgraded the PC to W10 when the free upgrade was available and what version of W10 the PC was running (Probably W10 Home).

Otherwise, you will have to pay for a W10 license as Microsoft closed the loophole that allowed users to continue to get free upgrades to W10 up to October of 2023.

All you need to do is to make a bootable USB installation flash drive with the W10 Media creation tool from the link below:

Make the 64-bit installation media.

Download Windows 10 (microsoft.com)

There is no need to format the SSD as I assume you plan on installing Windows on that drive.

After you install Windows, you can use the disk management utility to initialize the hard drive and use that for storage.

Initialize new disks | Microsoft Learn

Turn on the PC and immediately press the F9 key to get the boot options menu.

Select the F9 boot options menu, and from that, select the USB flash drive and press the Enter key.

Boot from the installation media.

You will be asked to select the version of W10 you want to install.

Select W10 Home/Pro (as applicable).

Then you will be asked to enter a product key.

Select the 'I don't have a product key' option and W10 will install and activate after you are connected to the internet.

I have been running W11 24H2 on my PC's during the last week or so, and things have changed as far as using Rufus on an old PC like yours...I have found that the bypass checks no longer work if the PC does not have any TPM security device or support secure boot.

The good news is this video will allow you to upgrade the PC to W11 24H2.

How to install Windows 11 24H2 on Unsupported PC (Early Access) 2024 (youtube.com)

Rufus will still work on upgrading the PC to W11 23H2.

Unless you have a W11 PC that meets the hardware requirements, you can't download the W11 24H2 ISO file yet until it is released to the public in September/October.