Hellbovine

Well-Known Member
I tried to boot to my USB stick to install Windows and it acts like it's about to boot into the USB drive to load Windows Setup, but the screen boots back into Windows and brings me to the desktop instead. I thought my tweaks were the problem, except I then tried an unmodified Windows 10 21H2 and that won't boot up either. I definitely did not change anything in my bios, so the problem won't be there. Has anyone else come across this before, it has to be some simple oversight that I'm just not thinking about.
 
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Prepare key with Rufus, (try to)install and report. Rufus dont get tired or brain farts. Doing stuff when you are tired leads to pebkac.
edit - finish up for the night and come back tomorrow after a good nights zeds.
 
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I used exFAT because the WIM file is too big for FAT32, and ExFat has some minor benefits over NTFS, such as eliminating the "blocked" files (savezoneinformation) which is an NTFS feature, and I didn't want the hidden .dat files, search indexer, and any other NTFS overhead attached to the files. Allegedly ExFat has some minor performance advantage too, but I didn't test that.

Googling last night reveals that this is a pretty common issue. Some people got it working by changing USB slots, and some people fixed it by reformatting, and some fix it by changing BIOS settings to legacy instead of UEFI. I assume the alignment/MBR/Etcetera gets corrupted sometimes, maybe on a botched reboot or something while the USB drive is still plugged in.

My motherboard is 10 years old though, so I'm using legacy mode because it bugs out otherwise. I don't plan on building a new PC until after I have an optimized Windows image. I'm trying the Rufus tool and also downloading W10 ISO again, and even the media creation tool, gonna try everything clean and original, reformatting USB drives fully, etcetera. I'll report back with whatever fixes it.
 
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The problem is not all BIOSes support non-FAT32 formats. You need a USB flashing tool which installs a FAT32 bootloader, then transfers execution to the NTFS partition. Rufus (among others) does that well.
 
Windows is installing now, resolved. It seems like it was a corruption issue. I do recall seeing the "You can't eject this drive because it's in use still" message a few times over the months, which of course didn't make any sense at the times because I wasn't accessing the drives and I always safely remove them through the Windows interface too, so this is clearly a bug in Windows that causes it to not release files that are no longer in use.

The annoying part of all this is that none of the standard options available could fix the drives. I had already tried using the Windows built-in disk management, I tried command line diskpart and format stuff, I tried GUI formatting the drives, I even reformatted the drives on a Chromebook too, along with trying all 3 options (NTFS, FAT32, exFAT), quick and full formats, and none of that would work.

It wasn't until I used the media creation tool to format the drive (it chooses FAT32 and you can't change that) and then I was able to boot to USB. I'm going to try Rufus and make it NTFS and try again too because one downside of the media creation tool is that although I can boot to USB it is now really slow to load the Windows Setup screen, like 30 seconds, where it used to take 2 seconds. I imagine this is because of the huge files on a FAT32 device causing slowdown, since the media tool compresses quite a bit due to using ESD.
 
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A little side note about exFAT for people using usb keys as storage in Network Audio Players.
Denon models - DNP720/730(800NE unknown) and DNP F109 do not read exFAT, they like FAT32 and nothing else. I have to format the key drives to FAT32 using Active@ Partition Manager. I assume that Marantz, being owned by the same parent company are the same.
 
So it turns out that my motherboard's USB slot was failing. It is over 10 years old, so that's to be expected. I ended up finding out for sure what the problem was when yet another install failed for no reason, and then later on after resolving that issue again I opened up my file explorer to "This PC" and while I was sitting there for a minute suddenly my USB thumb drive just disappeared from the list all by itself like it was ejected. My USB slot appears to be intermittently failing, which caused the randomness.
 
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