series of issues. windows cannot be installed at all

[hfiani]

ok first of all, hello everyone and sorry because this will be very long.

someone of my family got a gaming laptop, who is not very knowledgeable in PC at all, so i will tell you what i know.

this person got the PC around 1-2 weeks ago maximum. for some mysterious and unknown reason, windows stopped booting. i cannot remember the error code, but it was saying something like the startup was corrupted. first i tried to use the internal troubleshooting to try to repair which simply failed. but i noticed that in the partition list there was an unallocated 200 MB before the 76 GB windows partition and a ~800GB of unallocated space and the RECOVERY partition and a separate 16GB storage.(i used diskpart)

i concluded that the system reserved part was missing and most likely deleted due to this "mysterious" reason. so i decided to reset the PC. i used the internal windows reset option which failed, then i made a bootable win10 installation disk, which i tried to use to startup repair which failed to boot in the first place. i made a bit of search and it turned out i have to turn on legacy support, and then it booted and tried the startup repair and fresh install (without format) which failed.

i resorted to HP recovery which is supposed to delete everything and reinstall the windows from scratch. this is where the horror started, hp recovery failed, formatted the HDD and deleted itself (don't ask me why) now i have a usb drive with an empty hdd which is fine with 1 problem, now i am havinf the 3F0 problem. i search the internet the whole weekend, every solution i found failed (maybe it did not happen to me to encounter the solution on the internet this is why i need your help)

the first and fastest solution was to enable legacy, which was already on. i tried a combination of several solutions, like turn off both legacy and secure mode, clear the keys, reload the keys, reset bios, reset security etc... i tried everything doable in the BIOS which failed.

so i tried to reinstall windows from 0 using the freshly downloaded windows using legacy enabled and MBR bootable usb, because GPT did not work with neither legacy on or off. here i encountered the second problem. when i arrived to the disk selection page. i could see the 16GB and 1TB hdd both unallocated, and no matter what i do (create partition, full or half or anything) i ended with the "windows cannot be installed on this disk. the computer's hardware may not supported booting on this disk..." which also took me a lot of searching ending in the exact same result. only when i enter the Intel Rapid Storage Technology in BIOS, i cannot change any settings (including the SATA compatibility mode instead of AHCI)

i tried another set of solutions like bcdboot, bootrec, diskpart, all failed. also i noticed whenever i run bootrec /fixmbr, it succeeds but my USB disk stops booting, i have to recreate it on another PC. also bcdboot sometimes failes sometimes works, in both cases same results.

However i ran the diagnostics with a PASSED status so the HDD is fine. i feel like the HDD controller needs reconfiguration but i cannot change any settings regarding the Storage.

PS: i included some screenshots which i think might not be enough, so let me know what extra infos you need.

thank you everyone

[iomare]

Hi,

Since you say you see two drives, most likely the 16GB drive is Intel Optane Drive which is a caching device for the main hard drive.

A couple of questions. The USB drive with the OS, did you create it with media creation tool from Microsoft or did you have an iso on the other PC?

So you should set the BIOS to defaults and if there is the option, disable Intel Optane memory. Set to secure boot, set EFI mode.

Do you say both drives are wiped? Unallocated space. What I would do is clean 1TB drive, so from diskpart, select drive, once drive is selected type clean and press enter. This will wipe everything from the drive.

Insert pen drive and turn on PC and continuously press ESC until the startup menu appears. Press F9 to enter the Boot menu and choose the USB drive.

Now use the pen drive to install windows on the clean 1TB drive and once installed you can activate Optane again by installing the Intel software.

https://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c05591811

Hope it helps,

David

[hfiani]

Hello, first of all, thank you very much for the reply.

i used the media creation tool to download the ISO, since i have limited Capacity i cannot afford 4GB download each time my Flsh disk gets corrupted by an attempt to repair using bootrec /fixmbr. so i am using this iso downloaded from microsoft with rufus, using MBR supporting both legacy and UEFI.

as for the installation, i already tried to clean using diskpart, and try to install resulting with the same error (see the second picture)

i was thinking of updating BIOS. however i do not have windows at all to be able to execute the exe provided in the drivers and software page. can i use the recovery console from the windows installation or Hirens PE to execute it? or is there any way to install bios without any windows?

thanks

[hfiani]

it is worth to note that i used the same usb flash drive to test installing win10 on another laptop which was very fast and successful

[hfiani]

oh also forgot to reply to the Optane issue, anything related to the hard disks is not editable at all. i cannot enable or disable the Optane or Intel Rapid Storage Technology or change the controller or anything.

[hfiani · Accepted solution]

ok i solved this. this is what i did:

created a usb flash drive bootable windows 10 using rufus as GPT, then i booted it as Legacy on. i cleaned the hard disk and converted it to MBR using DISKPART. and even after the installation of windows, i still have Legacy enabled.