clean install of W11 problems

tinmar49 · 2025-06-16T05:02:35-0400

I have just changed the M2 hard drive in another W11 pc for a different one, (from WD 500 to a Patriot 256) The new drive has been wiped and formatted.
I have fresh boot media on DVD and it starts installing until it reaches 10% and then stalls and eventually fails. The installation has added the usual partitions and hidden ones as usual.
I have tried making a couple of USB sticks , 64gb formatted in NTFS and they both have 5906817024 bytes on them, but they are not even seen at boot up whichever socket they are in. I had to change their formatting from fat32 to NTFS to get Windows to install on them. The BIOS is set for UEFI. The Windows is the latest 24H2 version, as was the one that was on the pc before.The BIOS sees the Patriot ok. There will be no trouble activating Windows, it is not dodgy.

Gigabyte A320M-H
Latest BIOS F58G
Athlon 3000G
Patriot M2 256GB
8gb ddr4

This pc was running W11 pro fine and I decided to keep the WD 500 as the pc is to be donated to my local model club and will be used for storing their data on removable drives.

antspants · 2025-06-16T05:09:13-0400

Temporarily disable Secure Boot in the BIOS

tinmar49 · 2025-06-16T10:18:08-0400

I have looked at every BIOS setting and cannot find any mention of Secure Boot.
I was hoping that someone has an up to date W11 on USB to confirm that my ones are downloaded correctly by comparing the total bytes.
I could temporarly disable TPM which is on a daughter board rather than via the cpu.

With the DVD:
disk0 partition1 100Mb
disk0 partition2 16Mb MSR(reserved)
disk0 partition 3 238.4Gb primary
disk0 unallocated space 344Kb

That seems normal and it then goes to installing W11 and has got up to 10% in a few minutes and lookslike it has stuck yet again.

badrobot · 2025-06-16T11:20:20-0400

Try installing without formatting the drive. Let it do all the formatting by itself.

zbook · 2025-06-16T11:46:24-0400

Try to clean install Windows 10 > report any error messages or codes

If successful > upgrade to Windows 11 > report any error messages or codes

Clean Install Windows 10

How to Clean Install Windows 10

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Download Windows 10 ISO File

How to Download Official Windows 10 ISO file from Microsoft

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Download Windows 10

Upgrade to Windows 11

This tutorial will show you step by step on how to use an ISO or USB to manually upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 11 (older build/version), Windows 10, Windows 8.1, or Windows 7. Windows 11 has all the power and security of Windows 10 with a redesigned and refreshed look. It also comes with...

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suatcini54 · 2025-06-16T11:58:17-0400

In your motherboard, CSM support comes enabled by default. This means you don't have secure boot. In this case, you cannot install Windows 11 without some hacks because Windows 11 requires Secure Boot enabled along with TPM. You must disable CSM Support.

Hope this helps.

BamaInArk · 2025-06-16T12:00:36-0400

Bootable flash drives must be Fat32.

garlin · 2025-06-16T12:02:32-0400

When an install stops around 10%, it's normally a problem caused by not having the right RAID drivers.

You can confirm this by entering BIOS, and switching the SATA contoller from RAID -> AHCI.

suatcini54 · 2025-06-16T12:06:20-0400

Here you can find where you can enable TPM 2.0. TPM is also disabled by default, It is called fTPM by AMD CPU and PTT by Intel CPU.

tinmar49 · 2025-06-16T13:01:21-0400

I have just disabled CSM and trying for a boot from the DVD. I have been installing Windows since W95 and the proceedure from optical disk has not changed much, only the option "not having a product code" has been added as far as I know. Whether a disk has formatting has never stopped Windows from taking care of any partitions it wants and I simply let it get on with it, knowing that any data on the disk will be lost at that point.
Windows is just beginning to install, creeping up, and I have my fingers crossed that it goes past the dreaded 10%. It doesn't look good, even though the DVD drive light is continuing to flash, 10% has stuck even though the little rotating indicator is turning normally.
One of the first things I did in the BIOS was to disable raid in favour of AHCI.
I couldnt get the W11to install on the USB drives when they were set to fat32, it said that a 64Gb drive was not big enough for Windows. ?????

The last try ended exactly the same as all the others, about 1/2 hour at 10% than failure without any error code to report.

This pc, when I built it had W10 PRO 64 from a DSP OEI DVD which included a product key in it's sealed packet. I took advantage of the free upgrade to W11. I was under the impression that the free upgrade no longer exists even though I no linger needed a product key when it was W11. I would gladly try the W10 if I thought it could become W11 easily.

bobkn · 2025-06-16T13:16:37-0400

tinmar49 said:
I have just disabled CSM and trying for a boot from the DVD. I have been installing Windows since W95 and the proceedure from optical disk has not changed much, only the option "not having a product code" has been added as far as I know. Whether a disk has formatting has never stopped Windows from taking care of any partitions it wants and I simply let it get on with it, knowing that any data on the disk will be lost at that point.
Windows is just beginning to install, creeping up, and I have my fingers crossed that it goes past the dreaded 10%. It doesn't look good, even though the DVD drive light is continuing to flash, 10% has stuck even though the little rotating indicator is turning normally.
One of the first things I did in the BIOS was to disable raid in favour of AHCI.
I couldnt get the W11to install on the USB drives when they were set to fat32, it said that a 64Gb drive was not big enough for Windows. ?????

The manual states that CSM must be disabled to configure Secure Boot.

I didn't think that Windows 11 was installable on USB external drives without extreme measures. (I've never used Windows Go.)

You may be the last person in the world to install Windows from an optical disk. Most of us use USB thumb drives (8GB or larger). I don't know whether every motherboard requires a bootable USB drive to be FAT32, but it's what I always use.

If you formatted a USB drive from Windows, the largest partition it creates is 32GB. Even if the drive is larger. It's possible to create larger FAT32 partitions using 3rd party apps, but I've never done it. Windows can read and right to FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB, but Microsoft won't create them.

kelper · 2025-06-16T13:30:48-0400

suatcini54 said:
Windows 11 requires Secure Boot enabled along with TPM. You must disable CSM Support.Hope this helps.

I have installed 24H2 with secure boot disabled. It is not a MS requirement.

pseymour · 2025-06-16T13:35:51-0400

bobkn said:
If you formatted a USB drive from Windows, the largest partition it creates is 32GB. Even if the drive is larger. It's possible to create larger FAT32 partitions using 3rd party apps, but I've never done it. Windows can read and right to FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB, but Microsoft won't create them.

That’s a limit of the Windows format utility (in the GUI). If you use command prompt or PowerShell, you can format the whole drive. FAT32 volumes can be 16 TB (in theory).

bobkn · 2025-06-16T14:00:50-0400

pseymour said:
That’s a limit of the Windows format utility (in the GUI). If you use command prompt or PowerShell, you can format the whole drive. FAT32 volumes can be 16 TB (in theory).

Thanks for the correction/augmentation.

antspants · 2025-06-16T14:35:10-0400

Is the SSD MBR or GPT? Needs to be (or really should be) a GPT partition

tinmar49 · 2025-06-16T16:11:59-0400

I thought it was funny that my 64 Gb USB thumb drives only showed as 32 Gb, whether fat32 or NTFS. That still does not explain why the W11 won't fit on 32 Gb and NTFS will. Maybe my download is wrong, I have it the downloads folder as a disk image file size 5,832,097,792 bytes.

It's just got worse, I cannot stop it booting into the BIOS from either switched off or reset. That is without any external USB stick or a DVD in the drive. And thats not touching the keyboard either.

hsehestedt · 2025-06-16T16:37:52-0400

tinmar49 said:
I thought it was funny that my 64 Gb USB thumb drives only showed as 32 Gb, whether fat32 or NTFS. That still does not explain why the W11 won't fit on 32 Gb and NTFS will. Maybe my download is wrong, I have it the downloads folder as a disk image file size 5,832,097,792 bytes.

It's just got worse, I cannot stop it booting into the BIOS from either switched off or reset. That is without any external USB stick or a DVD in the drive. And thats not touching the keyboard either.

A couple of things here:

The reason that it showed as 32GB under NTFS was likely that the drive was partitioned with FAT32 first. Then, when you tried to format it as NTFS it formatted the 32GB partition but you still have another 32GB unallocated. Remove the partition (or extend it) to use the remaining space on the drive and you will now have a 64GB NTFS partition.

Next, the reason Windows won't fit is that the file install.esd or install.wim within the sources folder is larger than 4GB. FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit for any one file.

tinmar49 · 2025-06-16T16:54:19-0400

As I was stuck in the BIOS, I decided to use the "load optimum defaults" and the Bios is now normal. I tried the DVD and everything started a lot more normally but has stalled at a "this pc doesn't currently meet Windows 11 requirements".
I have encountered that before even though the Athlon 3000G is in the list of the usable CPU's. I have another pc with the same CPU running in the beta channel. I can temporaraly replace the Athlon with a Ryzen 5600G.

antspants · 2025-06-16T17:15:14-0400

See how you go if you create the install media with RUFUS (rufus-4.9.exe)

Download the latest “ISO”
- The latest ISO is generally downloaded via the Media Creation Tool. Windows 11 Version 24H2 build 26100.2033 ISO
- You can use that to download the ISO but when time, tell it to create the ISO and not burn to media (USB)

Download Official Windows 11 ISO file from Microsoft

This tutorial will show you how to download an official Windows Server or Windows 11 64-bit or ARM64 ISO file from Microsoft. Microsoft provides ISO files for Windows Server and Windows 11 to download. You can use these ISO files to clean install or in-place upgrade Windows 11. The Flight Hub...

www.elevenforum.com

Create the install media with Rufus
- Download RUFUS
- #1 Direct RUFUS to your USB
- #2 Direct RUFUS to the ISO
- #3 should sort itself out if the OS drive is partitioned properly. Your Windows OS really should be partitioned to GPT. Make sure #3 says GPT

When instigating the creation of the media and clicking “Start”
The following options will show. Select your choices.
- Select “Remove requirement for TPM 2.0
- With the rest; Deselect/Select whatever you do/don't want (Like Bitlocker)

Click OK then the USB install media will be created on the USB
Proceed to install Windows.

bobkn · 2025-06-16T20:24:22-0400

tinmar49 said:
As I was stuck in the BIOS, I decided to use the "load optimum defaults" and the Bios is now normal. I tried the DVD and everything started a lot more normally but has stalled at a "this pc doesn't currently meet Windows 11 requirements".
I have encountered that before even though the Athlon 3000G is in the list of the usable CPU's. I have another pc with the same CPU running in the beta channel. I can temporaraly replace the Athlon with a Ryzen 5600G.

That's not your problem. Don't swap CPUs.

I recommend that you disable CSM, enable Secure Boot, and enable fTPM.

I admit that I'm not sure whether all of those are absolutely required to install Win 11, but there's little reason not to set things up that way. If I had to guess, it's the fTPM that is making the Windows installer unhappy. According to the manual, it's off by default.

clean install of W11 problems

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