"We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one"

It's always worked fine for me. I just select the ISO image and Rufus does the rest. It's always installed just fine, even on another old laptop. I've installed on laptops with CSM and UEFI, using this same process, and never had this issue before.

Saltgrass said:

This pretty well removes the need to be concerned over FAT32..

To install, you need a drive free of any of the critical partitions. For a Legacy install, that means the OS and System Reserved. If, as was mentioned, the drive was used in a UEFI install, you can remove all the partitions during the install. Once that is done, the install can configure the drive as it sees fit.

So, when you get to the install page, are any partitions showing still on the drive?

One Note, make sure you are trying to install to the drive you want and not something else like an SD card or the flash drive.

Nope, all partitions have been erased.

The SD/USB drives don't even show up in the installer.

jimbo45 said:

1) ensure Laptop HDD has NO LOGICAL partitions -
2) ensure at least 1 partition is defined as ACTIVE otherwise Windows installer won't see the HDD
3) UEFI or MBR --your choice but I'd go for UEFI / GPT myself even on W10 32 bit.
4) ensure Protected boot is turned OFF (usually in BIOS that means enabling "Legacy boot" or similar
5) Windows won't install if target HDD and any USB's / SD cards etc show more than 4 partitions --you can have as many as you want after install.

1. No logical partitions.
2. Defined the partition as active via diskpart.
3. UEFI, for sure.
4. Legacy boot is on, yes. Wouldn't boot the installer otherwise.
5. Both HDD and USB have one partition.

jimbo45 said:

The problem isn't IMO anything to do with "comatibility of USB sticks" etc.
If a USB stick is defective you wouldn't have been able to get RUFUS to use it anyway.

That was my thought as well.

What I ended up doing was updating from XP to Windows 7, then from that to 10. It was a long process, but it worked. However, I would like to figure out why this problem occurred in the first place.

SoFine409 said:

Hi GuyInDogSuit,
Glad you got it sorted out. Too bad that you had to go through so much to fix it. Did you ever try using a USB2 stick as I suggested? I suspect that you didn't. I found lots of instances on this and other forums where using a USB2 stick fixed this problem since most BIOS do not natively support USB3.

2.0/3.0 had nothing to do with it...

SoFine409 said:

Thanks, so you tried it and it didn't work? It least you got it fixed eventually. I hope you didn't have too many apps to reinstall. Last time I did a clean install on my main PC it took two 10 hour days to reinstall everything.

The drive I used was 2.0. I only own one 3.0 USB drive, which is 32 GB and I don't use that for this purpose.

I didn't need to install anything other than Chrome, for this person.