Creating Bootable USB for Win 10

[Puffnstuff]

Wrong, windows scatters things where they don't belong as 10 placed my efi partition on a storage drive instead of the boot ssd which caused me a ton of problems until I wiped it out and created new partitions.

 

[Underclocked]

I've never seen that happen, Puffnstuff. Windows install is a bit more predictable and controllable than that. You had something else going on.

 

[Puffnstuff]

This has been typical windows behavior since back in the day and I learned early on to connect the boot drive only when installing an os. I erred when I left them attached and I'll never make that mistake again.

 

[Underclocked]

I am from back in the day and windows has always installed where I tell it to install.

 

[uclaLabrat]

Well, it seems that was part of the issue. The SSD was from my dad, so it already had an old partition on it, which I had left in place, and formatted the free partition (the small one was 26MB). I deleted the old partition and reformatted the drive. I had an upgrade install of win10 on my old HD, and trying to boot off it would give me an error saying boot manager was missing.

So I unplugged my primary HD and backup HD and installed off the USB to my SSD. That seemed to turn the trick. Not sure why, and it was sunday so I feel like I forgot a crucial detail or something, but the system is up with a clean install. I still haven't hooked up my old HDs yet, so porting those in may be a bear but we'll see.

Thanks to everyone for the help, it was frustrating but it worked and now my system feels snappy as hell.

 

[Iron Woode]

I decided to install Win10 to a logical drive partition and ran into the boot issue too.

It would boot fine with the USB drive in place but not with it removed.

the solution was freeBCD. Now I can dual boot between Win 8 and Win10.