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I've got 2 old towers and made a Frankensteins monster of the 2, but the 6yr old 1TB mechanical steam punk spinning hard disk was too slow and noisy, so I've brought a shiny 240GB Kingston SSD.

The rest of the tower is:

  • ASRock P55 Pro
  • Intel Core i3
  • 4GB 1600 DDR3 RAM
  • ATI Radeon 4650
  • OCZ 600W power supply

I cleared the HDD disk got steam installed and was thoroughly enjoying some classic gaming while I waited for the SSD to arrive. It was working fine - I had to install a legacy Win 8 driver for the Radeon but that was the only problem.

I then tried to clone the old HDD to the new SSD, but I ran into some problems regarding the sector size (512 on the HDD and 4096 on the SSD), I tried a few software applications and none of them were happy cloning it.

So I made the Windows 10 media creation USB stick, booted from it and tried to install to the SSD.

I started running into errors about installing to "Drive 2 Partition 1", so I switched my BIOS SATA controller to AHCI, rebooted, still couldn't install.

I used the SHIFT+F10 command to CLEAN the drive, then CLEAN, FORMAT, PARTITION, ASSIGN which I'd found in a couple of blog posts.

I've unplugged the HDD (which wont boot now either) and changed the boot order to SSD->USB and used the boot menu to select USB (this way ensuring SSD is 1st in boot order)

But it's still now installing...

I'm stick on the "Where do you want to install Windows?" screen.

I have 1 drive listed, 221.0GB of space, I can either format it or leave it unallocated and I get the following errors:

Unallocated space

Windows can't be installed on this drive - clicking that brings up:

Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu

If I ignore all that and just click NEXT anyway, it says

We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one. For more information see the Setup log files

Partition: 221.0GB Total Size, 220.9 Free Space, Type Primary

Window can't be installed on drive 1 partition 1

Clicking that or the NEXT button gives exactly the same output as if the space is unallocated.

One more thing to note, before all this I had an error about installing to GPT, but after doing the DISKPART and CLEAN stuff, that went away.

So does anyone know how I can get Windows 10 to install onto my shiny new SSD so I can load old classic games as if they were text files!

UPDATE

So I decided it must be the old motherboard, and went and brought a new mobo, socket 1150, MSI H81I with a fancy new BIOS.

Exactly the same problem, start the windows 10 boot and it freaks out about the SSD... I'm worried I've got some weird partition suck on it from my original installation attempts

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  • Windows can be picky when it comes to partition table. I had similar problems after zeroing HDD with dd (under Linux). Your cloning attempt may have set something that Windows doesn't like, but it's a wild guess. As I recall, the solution to my problem was to write a fresh, empty partition table to my disk (e.g. with gdisk under Linux).
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 21:30
  • Thanks, I have tried formatting and re-partitioning in both the windows gui installer and via the cmd (shift+f10)
    – Pete
    Commented May 11, 2016 at 16:29
  • Are you using the same pendrive to install windows 10 from? Asking because you seem to have covered the usual problem cases and windows 10 can be picky and cryptic when doing USB installs.
    – Hennes
    Commented Jun 22, 2016 at 7:29
  • Check my answer - SSD itself was busted, as far as I can tell. Makes sense seeing as no ones solutions fixed it but have helped others in the past
    – Pete
    Commented Jun 22, 2016 at 7:43

2 Answers 2

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So turns out the SSD was faulty, I borrowed another SSD and installed to that with no problems at all, same capacity just a Crucial instead of Kingston.

The Kingston has been returned and refunded and I kept the Crucial instead.

I wish I knew a way to have checked this during installation but I'm guessing it's something to do with the firmware on the unit itself?

So if every piece of advice people offer you doesn't work, it's probably the most obvious but unlikely solution- the SSD itself is faulty

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I just had the same scenario with the 480GB version of this drive, exactly the same error messages.

I took out the drive, put it in a mobile enclosure, formatted it with NTFS on a windows xp laptop, put it back in the pc and then I was able to install win 10.

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  • How does this help OP?
    – yass
    Commented Apr 13, 2017 at 14:32

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