Windows 10 Windows can's boot after Ubuntu install

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

Back to basics, how many physical hard drives do you have in the computer?

If you unplug the second one, (ironically probably listed as drive 1) and you start from scratch and use the Windows 10 installer, what stops it from installing?

Unless there is some kind of physical problem you can almost always get Windows to do a fresh install on a the C:\ partition of Drive 0.

It just formats and removes everything and installs itself from scratch.

I'm afraid the GParted stuff doesn't mean much to me, I'm used to seeing the drives and partitions listed in the format that Disk Manager uses, I've never used any other software to manage my drives.

But you should have Disk 0, Drive C:\ and then any other partitions on that physical drive.
Disk 0, Drive C:\ is where it should be installing Windows.

If your not seeing that option I'm not sure what it going on?

Take a look at this, especially the part that starts with Installing the ISO.

Clean Install Windows 10

It show how to get back to a basic one partition drive clean and ready to install Windows on.

Mike

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Hi again Kevin,
I agree with Mike here. Unless your Motherboard is bad, the reinstall of W10 on your bootdrive hard drive should work 100% of the time. Re-reading all the posts in this thread again, you haven't answered us on all the things I suggested you try back in my Post #7. The 2 key things you need to do to get your computer going again are: (1.) Remove your 2nd hard drive from the installation process, and (2.) Remove the SSD bootdrive and replace it with a brand new drive, either SSD or HDD-mechanical. With the multiple formatting of the partitions and drives you did, it's VERY likely you have messed things up on 1 or both drives beyond repair (especially when you formatted with the FAT (FAT-16) format. Modern drives today, especially SSD drives do not like that and it's often destructive.

You also didn't report back whether or not you tested that SSD drive with the link to hardware testing containing links to proper diagnostics to test SSD drives specifically. You also completely skipped the test of your RAM sticks. That can produce all kinds of installation in Windows of any version including W10 if there are failures. You need to run the MEMTEST as instructed for a minimum of 8 passes and post back the result of BOTH tests. Without you completing Hardware testing, we could go round and round for the rest of the year and never pinpoint your problem.

On the data recovery track, it's important too, that if you are a novice to data recovery, throwing all sorts of data recovery tools at your problem will most likely be counterproductive, in fact from our experience with many many users over the years it's more likely for you to lose any data on that SSD drive than to get it back. Your chances at winning the State lottery are better than you getting 99% of your data back when you have little or no experience in this area. I've been doing Data Recovery for over 30 years; and it's not something you learn in a few weeks! I already recommended to you that you Pull that drive out of your computer, and replace it with a brand new drive and then attempt a straight W10 install. You chose not to do this. Assuming that your RAM sticks are all healthy and passed the MEMTEST diagnostic, and that you are using known good W10 install media, as Mike said, 99.5% of the time, W10 should install on that brand new bootdrive. Period. If it doesn't, then most likely you have suffered a coincidental hardware failure in your Motherboard and that's a very expensive replacement; $175-$1,500. In most cases, it's cheaper to replace the entire PC.

This is really very simple, and I'll say it again NO SOFTWARE ON THE PLANET CAN FIX BROKEN HARDWARE!!!
Continuing to attempt further repairs on that broken SSD drive(you broke it when you formatted it with FAT format); is not going to get you anywhere with W10 or Ubuntu, let alone try to force it to work at this point when you still have unrecovered data on that drive!!
Hey, this is your computer and you can do whatever you want, but if you ignore these suggestions you are going to be in a world of hurt with both your data and trying to run a PC that's suffered some kind of hardware failure or failures. We're just trying to help you sort all of this out. You should also consider that between the people here that are trying to help you we have hundreds of Man-Years of experience doing this professionally to earn a living. You've now got all the information you need to solve this problem, if you are willing to follow our instructions. All of them.

Post back the results of your hardware testing if you don't mind, and then we can explore more Data Recovery options with you to get your stuff of that broken SSD drive.

Let us know how it goes.
BBJ

 

[kevin567]

Hi

Back to basics, how many physical hard drives do you have in the computer?

If you unplug the second one, (ironically probably listed as drive 1) and you start from scratch and use the Windows 10 installer, what stops it from installing?

Unless there is some kind of physical problem you can almost always get Windows to do a fresh install on a the C:\ partition of Drive 0.

It just formats and removes everything and installs itself from scratch.

I'm afraid the GParted stuff doesn't mean much to me, I'm used to seeing the drives and partitions listed in the format that Disk Manager uses, I've never used any other software to manage my drives.

But you should have Disk 0, Drive C:\ and then any other partitions on that physical drive.
Disk 0, Drive C:\ is where it should be installing Windows.

If your not seeing that option I'm not sure what it going on?

Take a look at this, especially the part that starts with Installing the ISO.

Clean Install Windows 10

It show how to get back to a basic one partition drive clean and ready to install Windows on.

Mike

Hey Mike I have to give you props! Removing the second harddrive, placing the original back in the first slot with the first data cable, converting it to a GPT format and clean installing worked! I now have the same exact setup I had before this whole Ubuntu 16 debacle! It is definitely going to be a while before I mess with any dual boot system but when I do I am one hundred percent going to copy all my files in a separate location before had and remove any extra drives that I may have installed. Its been quite the learning process but now I know how to repair and clean iinstall if I have to. Although I didn't end with the sparkly Ubuntu/Win10 dual boot that I set out to achieve I would say that this has been a success.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

I'm glad to hear that you've got it sorted.
Now make a System Image file of the C:\ drive and save it on another drive or partition.

I use EaseUS TODO backup, a free software program that is very easy to use, makes it's own boot disk in either Windows PE or Linux format and has always worked when ever I needed it to.

Free Download EaseUS Backup Software for Windows PC, Workstation and Server.

I make a new backup every month.

Mike

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

That's great news, Kevin! Glad we could help you.

I wanted to post an update about the dual-boot W10-Ubuntu16 configuration for you. This past weekend I had a brand new spare HDD (WD 320GB) I got a few months back in my parts box, so I threw it into my W10 test machine to test out this configuration issue. To my surprise and delight, I did a W10 Clean Install to the absolute latest version of W10 (v1607 b14393.222) and installed Ubuntu 16.04.1LTS with the "install alongside Windows10" option and it worked!!

In the back of my mind there was some thinking that my Acer mini netbook which is only a 32bit CPU and OS might be having a problem with Ubuntu detecting the correct type of CPU (32bit vs. 64bit) or something, so the above test install I mention on my W10 test machine (Dell Dimension E520 desktop) was worth trying on a true 64bit desktop machine. I'm not certain whether this is a bug with the new Ubuntu16 or not, and I haven't yet reported it. But, I probably will on the Ubuntu Community forum. I would like to get a hold of a 64bit laptop and do a W10 64bit OS install, and then install the Ubuntu16 with the same "install alongside Windows10" option I used on my Dell desktop.

***if there are any dual-boot enthusiasts out there who have a 64bit laptop to test this with, please give it a try and post back to let us know your result!***

In the meantime, since the Clean Install of W10 worked, chances are your bootdrive is Ok, and once you have an image backup as suggested by both Mike and I, you can give the dual-boot with the Ubuntu16 another go; according to the spec review on your machine (you didn't post the full exact Model) the CPU chip is a: 3.5 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-3770K processor. This is definitely a 64bit CPU chip, and the dual-boot should absolutely work since I can get it to work on my ancient Dell E520 machine which has a much earlier generation of 64bit Intel CPU chip (3rd Gen I think); your chip is a 5th Gen or 6th Gen i7 chip; pretty close to the most current so it should have no problem doing this if my nearly 10-year old Dell desktop can do it!

Let us know how you make out if you decide to try it; I'm pretty confident it should work for you based on my testing. Perhaps we'll get some of the other fellas here to chime in if they have tried this yet or maybe will give it a try.

Talk to you later,
Have a good week!
<<<BBJ>>>