Windows 10 installation New PC build 'Your PC ran into problems...'

SoFine409 said:

If the USB drive is 3 try a 2.

I started with USB 2.0 drive and have now tried a 3.0 one...but no luck.

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Megahertz said:

I suspect that your USB installation drive has a problem. Is your Sandisk a 64G drive?
- On Win 10, mount the iso file, or on a Win 7, with 7zip, extract all files and folders to a folder. Go to \sources and sort by size. Is there any file bigger than 4G?
If it has a install.wim bigger than 4G, please report so I can give you other instructions.
If it doesn't proceed as below.

- Format the Sandisk partition 1 (29340mb) USB drive as Fat32
- Copy all files and folders from the mounted iso or from the folder you extracted the iso files to the root of the USB drive.
It will boot as UEFI

Thanks for your message. The sandisk drives are both 32gb.
I've mounted the Win 10 (update1909) iso and you're right the install.wim is bigger than 4gb - 4.5gb in size. Also not sure if this is important but when I formatted the sandisk drives I used NTFS for both the GPT and MBR partition schemes

See if the computer can boot using Ubuntu:

Create a bootable USB stick on Windows | Ubuntu tutorials
Create a bootable USB stick on Windows | Ubuntu

lorestan said:

I started with USB 2.0 drive and have now tried a 3.0 one...but no luck.

(snip)

Thanks for your message. The sandisk drives are both 32gb.
I've mounted the Win 10 (update1909) iso and you're right the install.wim is bigger than 4gb - 4.5gb in size. Also not sure if this is important but when I formatted the sandisk drives I used NTFS for both the GPT and MBR partition schemes

If you wish to use a USB flash drive as a boot device to install Windows on a UEFI PC, the flash drive has to be formatted as FAT32.

You can't put a single 4GB+ file on a FAT32 partition, but that's OK. Extract the contents of the .iso onto the USB drive.

For a UEFI system, you don't even need to prepare the USB drive as bootable. It'll boot without that.

Why not use esd instead of wim?
It is more compact.

zbook suggests using Ubuntu. I suggest using Linux Mint: Zombie file cannot be deleted (access denied & file not found)

zbook said:

Why not use esd instead of wim?
It is more compact.

If you download a Win 10 iso from Create Windows 10 installation media, the install comes as sources\install.esd
If you download from Heidoc, that has much more options, the install comes as sources\install.wim and then you must have to split install.wim into install.swm and install1.swm.

I suspect you do not create the USB Flash drive correctly. You must use the ISO with Rufus or other tool, do not just copy the ISO file into the USB! It will never work this way. If you want an UEFI installation of Windows 10, then select GPT-UEFI in Rufus settings, and do not touch anything else. If you want a Legacy BIOS installation (fewer partitions, more disk space at main partition), then select MBR-CSM/BIOS and nothing else, leave it to format it as NTFS. If the Flash drive is GPT it should be detected and give you a Flashdrivename UEFI boot option on the list, use that one. Otherwise use the Flashdrivename option for Legacy boot. Once presented with the list of disks and partitions DELETE all partitions on the target drive and let Windows Setup automatically create any partitions needed. If you don't remove all partitions, installation might fail.