Hi all, I upgraded to win10 from win7 and attempted to perform a clean install after the upgrade. I formatted the hard drive while booting from the USB drive that holds the win10 iso. It wouldn't let me install the OS in the drive even though I deleted it and created a new partition again. What did I miss? Thanks!
I always leave a disk raw after removing partitions so let windows maken an partition trough the setup In my experience making manual partitions before setup gave me some problems in the past the same as you describe
You probably have a MBR based bootable USB, you can't install windows from MBR based USB to GPT partitioned drives and vice versa. You have two options Recreate the bootable USB with GPT. -or- Repartition the drive to MBR.
So windows 10 runs on the system. You should delete all partitions and format and you are left with unallocated space, you then hit the NEW, and have main largest partition, you must highlight the main large partition and click install. There is no reason to low level format, and if you have a fat32 flash drive and choose UEFI flash drive in boot menu it will install in GPT, and if it's a NTFS flash drive and boot from it you will get MBR. A professional, will wipe the HDD, called zeroing and they don't format, as formatting from NTFS to NTFS is ridiculous. Then they will clear CMOS and adjust the UEFI as needed, like making sure it's AHCI for storage if it's not default, making sure PIC-E is set Gen 3 if applicable or IGPU-GPU and so on. This is the right way to do a clean install.
Did you boot in UEFI or MBR/Legacy for the install? During install, SHIFT+F10 to get to the cmd prompt. Run diskpart, "sel dis 0", then "clean" to wipe the drive. The drive will be listed as uninitialized. If you've boot in UEFI mode you can also convert the drive to GPT from diskpart, "con gpt". Exit & continue install, Diskmanager should see the drive ok & create correct partition structure... Note if you want to fully clean the drive (takes ages), instead of "clean" (which is quick) it's "clean all"... Before I get flamed, diskpart commands work with the 1st 3 letters of command: cle = clean for = format sel dis 0 = select disk 0 etc...
What is the error message? What do you mean by: "The USB drive that holds the win 10 iso"? You mean you've extracted the win 10 iso to the usb drive or used rufus or the official win 7 usb/dvd store tool to create a bootable usb drive (ufd)? If you want to use it on an UEFI system you can format the usb drive in FAT32 and simply extract the win 10 iso to it (make sure the wim file is < 4GB, if it's > 4GB than you can make split wim files (swm) or compress it to esd format).
Clean does nothing but mark the sectors as empty, "clean all" which takes about an hour per 300g does wipe ( zero ) it. If you boot in UEFI windows will make it GPT format, no reason to use diskpart to make it GPT. @ OP, This makes sure no partitions or hidden sectors are left.