Laptop needs a clean install of Windows. Stuck on Troubleshooting.

[hellorhull]

I'm new to trying to troubleshoot computer issues so I apologize if this seems vague.. Basically the issue is that I need to do a clean-slate install of windows 8 and I've hit my dead end. The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite pre-installed with windows 8.

A few months ago I booted up and got "no bootable device -- please restart system" (seems like a common problem for these laptops..) Anyways, I couldn't figure it out so I used a hard drive dock to pack up all my data, made a usb stick into a bootable drive with Windows (Windows 8.1) and did a clean install. Now, a few months later, I booted up and got the same "no bootable device" message so I prepared to mimic exactly what I did before, but it's different, and this is where I don't understand what needs to happen.

The laptop will bring me to the Windows 8 advanced options/troubleshooting page. The "Reset" and "Refresh" options will just say "The media inserted is not valid / Make sure to insert your Windows installation or recovery media." I noticed that my USB-drive with windows on it doesn't even have to be inserted for it to bring me to the Windows 8 Troubleshooting page, which is odd because I used a hard drive dock to do a complete formatting of the laptop hard drive..so where is this page even loading from? I just want a clean install basically. Any suggestions on what to try to do this, or if I need to buy some sort of recovery disk from toshiba or windows? I'm not sure if that would even be relevant to this situation though.

 

[viveknayyar007]

Hello hellorhull

Assuming that you have already tried setting up the BIOS of your laptop to boot from USB or installation disc and the approach didn't work, one of the simplest methods in this situation would be to:

> Pull the hard disk drive out of your laptop.

> Connect it to a different PC as an external drive via USB.

> Locate the system partition of your hard drive. (Please note that it won't show as C: but some different letter would be assigned to it depending upon the number of drives that the other PC has.)

> Format the partition. (C: drive of the hard disk that you attached externally and that has different drive letter now.)

> Connect the hard disk drive back to your laptop.

> Insert the bootable media (USB or installation disc).

> Install Windows 8 normally.

Let me know if this helps. Good Luck!!

 

[hellorhull]

Okay thank you! This seemed to work