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    E403SA - Need help repartitioning hard drive to original state

    Discussion in 'Asus' started by oscarw, Jul 13, 2017.

  1. oscarw

    oscarw Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hi everyone. I have an ASUS E403SA laptop with a non replaceable hard drive (128GB). I played around with Linux on it for some time (after battling with the ridiculous BIOS settings for booting from a usb drive). Now I'm trying to revert back and install Windows again. I have the BIOS set to allow me to access the usb drive at start up and the installation begins. Unfortunately when I reach the Windows install location I get the dreaded:

    Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu.
    I've tried repartitioning, reformatting, etc. with gparted but it makes no difference. I did notice the drive shows up as "0" rather than "1")...if that makes any difference. Not a single option in the BIOS to edit the disk controller as far as I can see.

    Help? Cheers
     
    Last edited: Jul 13, 2017
    oscarw, Jul 13, 2017
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  2. namaiki

    namaiki "basically rocks" Super Moderator

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    Are there any recovery partitions that you want to keep? If not try boot into command prompt and use the "clean" command in diskpart to clean the disk which will erase everything.
     
    namaiki, Jul 13, 2017
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  3. oscarw

    oscarw Notebook Enthusiast

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    I think part of the issue is that I zapped the recovery partitions. I have it down to a single NTFS partition now and it doesn't seem to know what to do with it. Why does this BIOS have to be so basic? I tried Windows 7 just for ****s and giggles and that can't find a drive whatsoever - but from my reading that's normal in this case. Ugh... :/
     
    oscarw, Jul 14, 2017
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  4. namaiki

    namaiki "basically rocks" Super Moderator

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    I think the drive might have been converted to GPT somewhere along the way when Windows is probably looking for an MBR drive. Please try clean the drive with diskpart if you didn't try that already.
     
    namaiki, Jul 14, 2017
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  5. oscarw

    oscarw Notebook Enthusiast

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    I'll give it a shot and report back. Cheers!
     
    oscarw, Jul 15, 2017
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  6. oscarw

    oscarw Notebook Enthusiast

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    Here are the steps which worked for me -- in case someone comes along in the future looking for answers...

    • Use Windows download tool: put installer on flash drive

    • Use EaseUS Partition Manager to create a live cd for partition management (" WinPE")

    • Setup hard drive as a single partition, format as NTFS or FAT32

    • RESET BIOS to default settings

    • Boot to USB and begin installer

    • DELETE partition

    • Error message cleared, click Next...
     
    oscarw, Aug 4, 2017
    #6