Windows 1909 fresh install. Oh MY! Long story and a question

The journey.
I hit the power button to turn on my old ASUS G73SW laptop the other day and all that happened was the keyboard lights came on then shut down.
I tried several more times but nothing. No BIOS boot screen, nothing.
I inserted my rescue disk but could not even boot to it because the BIOS would not even post.
Turned out that my Crucial 480GB SSD died.

I thought no problem, I have spare drives and recent Macrium backups.
Installed an Intel 530 240GB drive and inserted my restore flash drive and booted up.
Restored my last backup to the Intel drive with Macrium by using the drag and drop partitions and re-sizing to fit the smaller drive.
That didn't work. the computer would not boot. Just got to the windows logo with spinning dots.
I tried the Macrium boot repair. That made it worse. The computer just booted to a black screen and said I had a corrupt file. I'll leave out the details here.

I thought OK, I installed a 2TB spinner and did the restore again letting Macrium do its thing.
No dice, same results as before. This drive was only used for backups. It never had an operating system installed.

I used fdisk and cleaned the drive
I thought oh well, I'll just Fresh install windows 10.
HA! Got me. Windows would not install!!!
It would get to the next to last step and say "cannot install windows corrupted file.....

Ok, I installed the Intel drive and had the same results on the fresh install as above. Nada!
Hours and hours of searching finally came across this info:
"Run Parted Magic which is on the drive. It has a terminal window and the command he used was
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=1"
Since I had Parted Magic I decided to just "Secure Erase" the drive.
That fixed my problem, Windows installed as intended.

I did the "Secure Erase" on the 2TB spinner 2 1/2 Hrs.) and windows installed on it as well

Can anyone explain why the disk had to be "Secure Erased" to get windows to install?
I'm just going to chock up the bad Macrium restore to hardware differences.

Yeah, seems odd especially since you tried multiple different disks. Another thing that doesn't make sense is that you were not able to boot from the rescue media. You should be able to boot from the rescue media no matter what was wrong with any of the HDs / SSDs.

Another big clue was that you said that the system would not even post. I would have maybe tried some other things like clearing the BIOS CMOS contents and then resetting the BIOS settings from scratch and going from there.

hsehestedt said:

Yeah, seems odd especially since you tried multiple different disks. Another thing that doesn't make sense is that you were not able to boot from the rescue media. You should be able to boot from the rescue media no matter what was wrong with any of the HDs / SSDs.

Another big clue was that you said that the system would not even post. I would have maybe tried some other things like clearing the BIOS CMOS contents and then resetting the BIOS settings from scratch and going from there.

Thanks guys.
The Crucial SSD was the issue causing the original problem of not being able to get to the BIOS post screen. I reinstalled it into the laptop (using the second drive bay) after I finally had the system up and running again on the Intel drive, same result - the computer would not start until I removed the Crucial SSD.

I installed the 2TB spinner into the second drive bay and the computer booted right up. The drive bays appear to be fine.

There is no way to reset the BIOS on this laptop unless you can enter the bios upon startup.
No cables for the disks, the connectors are built onto the motherboard.

I connected the Crucial SSD to a "SATA to USB3 cable" that I use to backup my systems to external hard disks and plugged it into my other laptop. The Crucial drive would not even show up. I tried all USB ports with the same result. No Crucial SSD.

I have two Windows install Flash drives, one is a full WIM setup downloaded directly from Microsoft, and the other is an ESD by using the Media Creation Tool.

Back to my original question, why did I have to "Secure Erase" both of my spare drives before Windows would complete the installation?