I can't boot from any media to do the clean install

I'm unconvinced that the A8N-SLI cannot be booted from a USB stick. (I should remember, because I used to own one. However, I handed the machine down, and it has since died.) A little Web searching finds posts from people who claim to have done it.

With the PC powered down, and the USB drive plugged in, press the F8 hotkey. That will bring up a boot menu that allows you to choose a boot device. (It's a one time choice. I've preferred that to changing the BIOS settings.) I'm not sure how the USB drive would appear; perhaps as "removable".

Just for luck, make sure that the USB drive is formatted as FAT32. FAT would be required for a UEFI installation. It may not be required for an old BIOS, but it should do no harm.

bobkn said:

I'm unconvinced that the A8N-SLI cannot be booted from a USB stick. (I should remember, because I used to own one. However, I handed the machine down, and it has since died.) A little Web searching finds posts from people who claim to have done it.

With the PC powered down, and the USB drive plugged in, press the F8 hotkey. That will bring up a boot menu that allows you to choose a boot device. (It's a one time choice. I've preferred that to changing the BIOS settings.) I'm not sure how the USB drive would appear; perhaps as "removable".

Just for luck, make sure that the USB drive is formatted as FAT32. FAT would be required for a UEFI installation. It may not be required for an old BIOS, but it should do no harm.

I've been using the F8 key boot override on my A8N-SLI motherboard. The USB stick does appear as a hard drive but no bootable USB stick I tried has worked. A Google search did not indicate anyone had success booting from them. Remember USB memory sticks were relatively uncommon in the dark ages of 2004.

I've now tried installing the 64 bit version of Windows 10 by booting my Windows 8 x64 DVD then running setup.exe. I've tried the clean install by running setup.exe from USB stick and DVD but in both cases the PC just hangs with the blue Windows logo at the start of the first reboot. I also installed Windows 7 x64 and tried a clean install of Windows 10 x64 from there but hit the same problem.

All approaches fail at the same point i.e. the PC hangs after the first reboot. I'm installing on a minimal system as I did when I installed Windows 10 32 bit. I welcome any advice on overcoming this installation hurdle.

Is the BIOS updated to the latest version?
Go back to 32-bit Windows.

NavyLCDR said:

Is the BIOS updated to the latest version?
Go back to 32-bit Windows.

I have the latest BIOS for that old motherboard but of course ASUS haven't updated it for ages. It could be a BIOS issue which affects the 64 bit installation only. If so, I'll admit defeat.

I have the 32 bit installation backed up using Reflect but I'm interested in the technical challenge of making the 64 bit version work on old hardware.

Steve C said:

I've been using the F8 key boot override on my A8N-SLI motherboard. The USB stick does appear as a hard drive but no bootable USB stick I tried has worked. A Google search did not indicate anyone had success booting from them. Remember USB memory sticks were relatively uncommon in the dark ages of 2004.

I thought that might be the case. I know not to expect people to post everything they've tried.

I'm not completely confident of this, but I believe that your Athlon 64 CPU may lack the CMPXCHG16b feature, which is one of the obscure requirements for 64 bit Windows 8.1 and 10. If that is the case, you're basically stuck with X86 (32 bit). There are supposed to be hacks to work around that, but I've never used them.

bobkn said:

I thought that might be the case. I know not to expect people to post everything they've tried.

I'm not completely confident of this, but I believe that your Athlon 64 CPU may lack the CMPXCHG16b feature, which is one of the obscure requirements for 64 bit Windows 8.1 and 10. If that is the case, you're basically stuck with X86 (32 bit). There are supposed to be hacks to work around that, but I've never used them.

I spotted the CPU instruction requirement and my CPU is OK confirmed by Coreinfo. I checked my CPU does support Physical Address Extension (PAE), No-eXecute (NX), Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2) and the CMPXCHG16b (CX16) feature.

I found a few useful threads with people reporting the same problem I have. Some were successful with the A8N-SLI and Windows 10 x64. A consistent but strange solution is to change the hypertransport (HTT) setting from 'Auto' which I have to 1x for the installation which would seriously underclock the CPU and memory. Will try tomorrow.

I've made some progress. I reset the BIOS defaults and can install working versions of Window 7 Pro 64 bit and Windows 8 Pro 64 bit. I can now boot the Windows 10 DVD and installation media created by the Media Creation Tool but the PC hangs after the first reboot showing a static blue Windows logo on a black background. I tried updating from Windows 7/8 using the Media Creation Tool media but the Windows 10 installation hangs at the same point. All attempts to install Windows 10 64 bit fail at the same point after the first reboot. I'm running a minimal hardware configurations so I'm wondering if there is a BIOS incompatibility with Windows 10. It's surprising Windows 8 64 bit installs with the right drivers but Windows 10 doesn't. I can't find any obvious errors in the installation logs.

Could I perform a clean install of Windows 10 64 bit in a MBR configuration using a virtual machine, save an image using Reflect then restore that image to the old PC using the deploy function in Reflect? Is there perhaps a chance Windows 10 will find the right drivers and activate (since I already have a digital licence for the PC for Windows 32 bit)?