Once you have the Z: drive on your external hard drive, go back to your D: drive that is the ISO file that you opened by double clicking on it. Highlight all of the files and folders from D: drive and copy and paste them to the Z: drive. Do you need more exact instructions for that? Once you've done that, your external hard drive will now be bootable in UEFI mode on your computer and will boot into Windows setup, but we aren't quite ready for that yet.
OK! I'll do just that, but as it is now 04:46am here, hope it's cool that I'll do that in a few hours, after sleep :)
You may continue with the steps if you're free right now and the time is right for you. I promise I will go step-by-step according to your writings :)
Thanks so much for the detailed and very helpful support.
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No, I'm perfectly fine with copy & pasting...
What?!? No "all-nighter"?!? I can't tell you the number of all-nighters I pulled installing different Beta versions of Windows all the way from Windows 98 to Windows 10! That's OK. I've wiped out many installations by mistake when I was dead tired at 2:00AM. And that was after downloading Beta versions of Windows for 2-3 days solid via dial-up modem. Get some sleep. Directions will still be here!
Stage 3: Let's save your existing hardware drivers to your Z: drive. Create a folder on Z: drive called Drivers. Open a Command Prompt (Admin): click on the Windows start icon, just start typing Command. Once Command Prompt appears in the search results right click on it and select Run As Administrator. Answer Yes to the UAC prompt. In the Command Prompt window that opens run the following command:
dism /online /export-driver /destination:Z:\Drivers
Watch the magic! Now, if you want to you can go to the Asus support website and download all the driver files there to your Z:\Drivers folder, but you don't have to. Any driver currently installed that is not included with Windows is saved to different folders under Z:\Drivers. After the clean install, if you get any hardware with triangle ! or "unknown device"s in Device Manager, you can manually install the driver by right clicking on it in Device Manager, select Update Driver, then Browse my computer for driver software. Enter the path to Z:\Drivers. NOTE: after the clean install, the drive letter Z: will change! Change the following instructions to the new drive letter! It may be something like E:\Drivers after the clean install! Make sure the Include Subdirectories box is checked. Then Next. Your hardware driver will be installed from the one you exported! I would only do this if you need to re-install a network card driver to get on the internet, then run through all the Windows updates first.
Now you're ready to make sure you can boot from the USB hard drive and do your clean install!
What will that do exactly? I mean... It won't harm my 1TB external hard drive, right? Is it just a part of it which is free that shrinks\gets partitioned into 32GB?
Sorry if that's a stupid question but I'm not partitioning hard drives usually, so I'm not familiar with those procedures...
That will create an empty 32GB space on your hard drive and create an additional partition in the empty space. As long as you right click on the 32 GB unallocated space to create the New Simple Volume (partition) in, your existing partition will be unaffected (although it will be 32 GB smaller in size). I am doing all of this procedure on my own computer as I am posting it to make sure it is correct. That is how I discovered that you need to enter a New Simple Volume size of 32768 (which is 32 GB expressed in MB). My unallocated space actually went to 32769 MB. 32769 MB, though, is too large for a native Windows FAT32 partition and I could not create the FAT32 partition unless I manually changed the size of the New Simple Volume back to 32768.What will that do exactly? I mean... It won't harm my 1TB external hard drive, right? Is it just a part of it which is free that shrinks\gets partitioned into 32GB?
Sorry if that's a stupid question but I'm not partitioning hard drives usually, so I'm not familiar with those procedures...
Once you get the FAT32 partition on your external HDD, the ISO file CONTENTS copied into the partition, and have exported your drivers to the partition, the next step is going to be to get your computer to boot from it. And that, actually, is likely to be the most difficult part of the process.
Here's the first way to try:
In Windows 10, click the restart button. When the computer first comes back to life with the very first screen at "power up", start tapping the F12 key. Hopefully that brings up the boot override menu. Look for the option that looks like the USB hard drive, and select it. See if the computer boots into the Windows setup screen. If it does, and your ready for the clean install, you can start it. More directions will be in more posts below. If you aren't ready to start it, you can press Shift + F10 (you might have to press Shift + FN + F10). This will open a command prompt window. In it you can run: shutdown /t 00
That will shutdown the computer and then you can restart it normally to get back into your existing Windows 10.
I'm going to have dinner. See if you can get into the Windows Setup Screen, and also review clean install here:
Clean Install Windows 10
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Remember the good ole' days of the horrible noises from dial-up modem, 14.4kbps, then 28.8, then the amazing ISDN 56.6kbps! LOL... Good night pal.
