Can't install own Win10 Pro on laptop model 15-db0069wm

[DWKindig]

Howdy all!  I picked up this laptop during WM's Black Friday deals, knowing it only had Windows 10 Home and a 5400rpm 1tb drive.  I have an unused non-OEM Windows 10 Pro license and a 500gb Corsair SSD, so I was going to swap those in, but it just will not work, usually resulting in some sort of write error during installation, and always failing to find a boot record on the drive even when installation succeeds:

1)  The drive is only a couple years old and is definitely in good condition; I took it from an old circa-2008 Dell XPS 13", and the last thing I did before coming to the forum was to reinstall it in that same machine and do a full Windows 10 Pro installation off the same USB stick I'd been using in the HP -- zero problems encountered, install to desktop took maybe 15 minutes.

2)  The Windows 10 USB installer (created by downloading an ISO from the official Media Creation Tool and burning via Rufus) would frequently fail, reporting that a file it had written had been corrupted.  It also was painfully slow, taking like an hour just for the "copy files" step.  Neither of these issues were encountered on the same USB when doing a clean install on the aforementioned Dell, and the same situation occurred when using a brand-new USB drive, and when using any of the USB ports on the device.

3)  I've tried with Secure Boot both enabled and disabled, and after wiping the secure boot keys, and after restoring the secure boot keys.

4)  I've tried in UEFI-boot-only mode with a UEFI partition scheme, and Legacy boot mode with both a UEFI partition scheme and an MBR scheme.  UEFI mode (or UEFI on legacy) fails to find /BCD, and MBR fails to find an operating system.

5)  I used a SystemRescueCD USB stick to boot a live Linux environment, from which I cloned the original hard disk (first 2MB for UEFI, then partitions 1, 2, 4, and 5, leaving the middle partition blank since it was not the full 1tb), and then let it boot, at which point it would bring up the Windows Recovery Mode launcher and ask me what to do.  I selected Factory Reset, and it began the process, but would fail between 5-10%.  I tried cloning partition 3 from the source drive and shrinking it with the SysResCD tools to fit in the available space, and Windows still would not boot, nor would Factory Reset work.  (I don't know if this would even work in the first place -- if the Factory Reset tool knows to expect a 1tb disk and is trying to partition it according to that, though I would expect my complete cloning of the disk to work.)

6)  I swapped the 1tb HDD back in, set up Windows, then used the Media Creation Tool to create a recovery disk with the complete recovery data on it, then swapped the SSD back in and tried to recover from the USB drive I'd just created, but same issue as #5.

So, I don't know what to do next.  SOMEthing is up.  It's like something is mad that I'm not using the included 1tb drive, or there's something specific about this Corsair drive that is throwing the system for a loop, OR there's something about the non-OEM Windows Installer that the system doesn't like.  I don't have a spare drive to test, though I'm ordering one anyway 'cause I need an upgrade for my desktop so I figure I'll try that out in the laptop first.  Does anyone have even a smidgen of a clue or suggestion as to something I might have overlooked, no matter how obvious and/or ridiculous?

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

It seems to me that you have done almost everything under the sun to install W10.

However, I did notice according to some specs I found online, that your notebook has a DVD drive, and here is what I suggest...

Let me backtrack first...Since there is a W10 Home product key in the BIOS, you are going to get W10 Home on there no matter what you do, because the product key that is in the BIOS trumps any other product key not in the BIOS.

So, if you are succesful going through the steps I recommend...see this guide for how to upgrade from W10 Home to W10 Pro.  Read the section under the Upgrade using a Windows 10 Pro product key.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12384/windows-10-upgrading-home-to-pro

1.  If you know have a good W10 ISO file, use this free DVD burning software to burn the ISO file to a DVD.  Burn it at the slowest possible speed you can.  When you launch the program, select the Burn ISO File option.  You will have the option to select burn speeds.

https://www.cdburnerxp.se/en/download

2. When booting from a DVD, you must have legacy mode enabled, and secure boot disabled in the BIOS.

3. With the DVD in the drive, turn on, or restart the PC, tap the ESC key to get the menu of options. 

Select the F9 boot options menu, and from that, select the legacy, or internal DVD drive, press the enter key, and hope for the best.

[DWKindig]

It has been so long since I've burned anything to a DVD drive, I totally didn't think to try that.  I'll give it a go this weekend and report back!

[DWKindig]

So, it took an extra week to receive the new SSD, but I did burn the ISO to DVD and installed using that, and lo-and-behold, it ran fine.  Only weird thing is it didn't recognize the built-in OEM license, and asked me to provide my product key -- which I did, and it proceeded from there without incident.

Can't imagine what went wrong with the initial attempts, but oh well -- at least the DVD workaround did fine.  Thanks for the suggestion!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Glad to read that you are back up and running.

Yes, very odd situation you had there, and then Windows asking for a product key...W10 should have just found the key in the BIOS and activated automatically.