Make the ISO, use the - gotta love that name - and you should be good to go. Never had one issue using that tool for as long as it's existed (7+ years now), never had one failure, and it always works in my experience.When I saw the thread title I was thinking that (perhaps) somehow the actual ISO file itself - which is between 2.6 and 3.5GB in size depending on whether it's the 32 bit or 64 bit version - has been copied/burned to the DVD but that's somewhat unlikely I suppose, I've seen stranger things happen. Make the ISO, use the - gotta love that name - and you should be good to go. I tried the DVD method first, then the USB. It wasn't a logo, just the dots that have replaced the old hourglass.
Nonetheless, I came back to find it had finally advanced to a screen to select language, etc. Advancing past that I selected 'repair computer'.
That screen disappeared and nothing has replaced it for more than 30 minutes. Ugh.Update: the screen finally progressed to present choices. I chose Troubleshooting, Automatic Repair. Waiting through another blue screen again.
This has been progressing much slower than I've ever experienced. I've stripped the system down to just one SSD w/Win10, the video card and two sticks of RAM. (For what it's worth, I did discover I had the RAM in slots 1 and 3 rather than 2 and 4.)Win10 still doesn't boot, so I booted from the ISO file on the USB again. While it processed much more smoothly and timely, it was unable to complete Startup Repair.
I then tried the Bootrec commands suggested on a website, but /rebuildbcd was unsuccessful - said there were 0 installations.At this point I'm leaning towards a fresh installation of Win10 unless someone has a better suggestion. The closest I've come is with a Win7 disk. The system recognizes it for what it is, let's me choose language, etc., proceeds to a black screen with a progress bar showing installation progress (or something), but then the Windows logo appears on a blue screen and never proceeds. The logo is kinda pulsating, it's not a freeze frame.If I drop to a single stick of RAM I don't get that far. If I try with a different SSD I don't get that far. 'don't get that far' is a black screen with white and yellow text talking about Shell: or something. At one point, I think trying to boot from the Win10 ISO on USB, I got a message about the SSD 'Windows cannot be installed to this disk.
The selected disk is of the GPT partition style'. (I've run into this before, but I don't recall if it was this system upgrading from Win7 to Win10 or when I put Win7 on the older system's SSD. Nor do I recall how I resolved it.
From what I've read it's a newer way to format boot disks that is compatible with UEFI, which my mobo supports.)I've tried so many combinations and failed I don't know where to go from here. I've also replaced the CMOS battery, though the older one was less than two years old.
Maybe it's the mobo? Last night I tried a more methodical approach to ensure I'd tried everything and to make a long story short, found the problem. Whenever the newest SSD (Samsung 850 less than two years old) is attached it fails immediately. So, with just the original SSD attached I tried booting from the USB with Win10 ISO and I was successful. The OS is loaded and running normally.
Neither this system nor my older system can read or initialize the other SSD. It appears it is corrupted to some extent. Which I find odd considering it only held my games which functioned perfectly fine. I guess I'm SSD shopping now.