bootable drives

minimikev1

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so... recently i bought windows 10 as an upgrade from my vista, hoping that as i have gone from 32 bit to 64 bit it will allow me to use the full 4gb of ram it has. so when i bought windows 10, i bought it as a activation code and not a disk so then i had to try and download the software, thinking it would be a simple download. i got the iso image, then i got a 400gb hard drive after some other troubles, i then realised stuff needed to happen with the harddrive so eventually i created a partition, formatted the drive as an NTFS so i could make it into FAT32 as a botable drive. that all worked, i tried rebooting it and it recognised there was a bootable drive there but it soon said something like no boot sector found or something so i went back on the harddrive, went to another forum and saw i had to extract the iso image in the harddrive. i did that, i re-booted it and same problem! can anyone help pleaaassseee... yeah. thanks for assumed future help! cya
 
I'm confused. So you're trying to install a fresh copy of Windows 10 on your blank 400GB hard drive, correct?

Double clicking on the ISO image should prompt you to burn it to a DVD, which you can then boot to and install windows 10 on the drive.

If you can't do that then you can use a flash drive and install windows 10 from that. Follow these steps from this page:

1.Insert a USB flash drive into a running computer.
2.Open a Command Prompt window as an administrator.
3.Type diskpart.
4.In the new command line window that opens, to determine the USB flash drive number or drive letter, at the command prompt, type list disk, and then click ENTER. The list disk command displays all the disks on the computer. Note the drive number or drive letter of the USB flash drive.
5.At the command prompt, type select disk <X>, where X is the drive number or drive letter of the USB flash drive, and then click ENTER.
6.Type clean, and the click ENTER. This command deletes all data from the USB flash drive.
7.To create a new primary partition on the USB flash drive, type create part pri, and then click ENTER.
8.To select the partition that you just created, type select part 1, and then click ENTER.
9.To format the partition, type format fs=ntfs quick, and then click ENTER.
Then lastly, extract the contents of your Windows 10 ISO file to the flash drive. You can use the free tool 7-Zip to extract the contents. It should be bootable and will detect your 400GB drive for installation.
 
should the harddrive be formatted as NTFS or fat32 as i have done everything else in command prompt and extracted the iso image of the windows 10 software- the drive is already bootable but it says there is no boot sector
 
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If you mean that you're formatting a flash drive to make it bootable then use NTFS.

The windows install process will reformat the hard drive for you, so you don't need to worry about that. But it will be NTFS also.
 
What system are you trying to put this on? Is it 32 bit or 64 bit? A little info about your computer would help us help you.
 
i currently have a dell inspiron 1525 eith windows vista 32 bit home premium and i am just trying to put windows 10 pro 64 bit onto it. i am aware that it will fully wipe my computer when it does that
 
We do need to know what your computer specs are because it could well be, if you are trying to upgrade from Vista to win 10, that your computer CPU cannot handle 64 bit architecture, although to be honest the install should tell you that. I don't think Joedaman633's idea will,probably, not work because Win 10 made from the media creation tool looks to see if it has a valid installation criteria and Vista is not a valid upgrade operating system but I could be wrong with that assumption. I just assumed that is why you bought Win 10 rather than going for trhe freebie. Other than that it really should be a matter of bunging in the disk, I'm assuming you got Windows 10 on a DVD, and letting it do it's thing. You will have to set your bios to boot from the DVD rather than the hard disk or if your bios is new enough hit F12 while it is booting at the initial bios stage and choose the boot menu and then select your DVD player.

Ah just reread your OP and you have an ISO. In that case you will need to make a bootable installation DVD from that ISO. Use CDBurnerXP (just google it it's free) and then use that bootable DVD in the way that I have described above.
 
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