Help - installing Windows on a blank hard drive

[Andeh13]

I have a Levono Yoga 300 - cracking little laptop. It had a 32gb hard drive though, which meant that when windows forced itself to update to windows 10...it ran out of space & gets itself stuck in a perpetual loop of trying to install, running out of space & failing.


Bit of research showed that you could install a SSD pretty easily in the Yoga book, cloning the 32gb boot drive onto the SSD & you are all set....or so I thought!

I used Macrium Reflect, but got a random ''Error 8 - unable to clone'' when I tried. Despite a few attempts & struggling to find an effective solution I gave up.

I figured I would try a USB stick, install windows 10 onto it & boot off it and install off that - something I failed at beforehand when I was trying to update windows 10 on the 32gb SSD it came with.

Once again, despite two different memory sticks ( a 64gb USB3 and a 32gb USB2) I get an error message saying unable to create boot disc on this machine.

So I am really fed up of technology now & how bloody difficult it seems to be to just do as its told!

Can anyone suggest another route I might try? I have a USB -> Sata/Power (first one failed, second one works...)

[Lost4words]

Have you made sure that the new drive can be seen by the pc? It should be showing in the bios.

[Andeh13]

Yeah, I allocated it via Disk Management so it would be detected. Half way through the Macrium Reflect bit it wipes this allocation it out - though I am no sure if thats by design or not!

[SUMMONER]

I get an error message saying unable to create boot disc on this machine.

At which point do you get that message?

I plonked Windows 10 on an old HP Stream 7 tablet with 32GB eMMC storage. Made the Windows 10 USB stick via the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool, 'deleted all the existing partitions' after booting the tablet off the USB stick and then allowed Windows to recreate what partitions it needs on its own by clicking next. All worked without any problems in my case.

[Disturbedguy]

I have a Levono Yoga 300 - cracking little laptop. It had a 32gb hard drive though, which meant that when windows forced itself to update to windows 10...it ran out of space & gets itself stuck in a perpetual loop of trying to install, running out of space & failing.


Bit of research showed that you could install a SSD pretty easily in the Yoga book, cloning the 32gb boot drive onto the SSD & you are all set....or so I thought!

I used Macrium Reflect, but got a random ''Error 8 - unable to clone'' when I tried. Despite a few attempts & struggling to find an effective solution I gave up.

I figured I would try a USB stick, install windows 10 onto it & boot off it and install off that - something I failed at beforehand when I was trying to update windows 10 on the 32gb SSD it came with.

Once again, despite two different memory sticks ( a 64gb USB3 and a 32gb USB2) I get an error message saying unable to create boot disc on this machine.

So I am really fed up of technology now & how bloody difficult it seems to be to just do as its told!

Can anyone suggest another route I might try? I have a USB -> Sata/Power (first one failed, second one works...)

We use varying Lenovo machines at work and constantly run into varying issues with stuff like this when trying to wipe disks, especially new machines that only have M2 SSD's.

We generally find that the problem is because secure boot is enabled in the BIOS, more often then not we find disabling this, allows us to fresh install an OS

[Andeh13]

Thanks mate! I dug deeper at why I was getting the error message and it was because the memory stick was Formatted incorrectly. Reformatting to NTFS allowed me to create a USB boot stick, which allowed me to install Windows to the blank SSD!

[silk186]

I always use the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool and I've never had an issue.

[redlizer]

Another popular tool to make windows 10 install usb is Microsoft USB/DVD Download Tool