StoreMI - Create Bootable StoreMI greyed out - windows

Situation: New PC Build
- Windows 10
- Samsung Evo 970 256GB NVME
- WD Blue 1TB potato drive
- AMD Ryzen 7 2700X on Asus Crosshair VII Hero
- GTX 1070
One of the main benefits of Ryzen 2, for me, was the StoreMI feature that I really hope to get working. I watched AdoredTV's video of how he set his up, but unfortunately for me, I'm not having any luck.
Greyed Out no option to create Bootable StoreMI
I have gone into Windows Disk Management and made sure the drives are visible to the OS, and they are also visible in File Explorer.
Windows Sees the Drives
If I try to remove fast media, I get this message, and the program closes.
If I try to modify, I get nothing useful.
So...I need some help figuring out what I've done wrong. Could I have something in the BIOS I need to fix? Other? I'm at a total loss.
Edit 1) I may have another clue? One of my greyed out drives is the same drive as the drive that's selectable, and they're "both" in a Tier. Looking at the Disk Manager, it seems my "System Reserved" is for some reason on the NVMe drive when it should have...I would have thought...been installed on the same drive the OS was installed on. I know I didn't tell Windows to do this.
So maybe this is a clue? Can I move the "System Reserved" Partition over to the spinning rust? Would that help?
Same Drive occupies both tiers?

Ok, well AMD customer support never emailed me back. It's been about 48 hours now. Not counting the RTFM email which was useless.
So...I figured...Maybe I'll ask the people I learned the most about this from, either AdoredTV, or Level1Techs. So I went to the Level1Techs forum, and talked to Wendell himself. He diagnosed and suggested a fix (that worked) in about 5 minutes. On my Windows install, I selected the C: (slow) drive to install the OS on, however, the OS set up the "System Reserved" partition on the NVMe drive...even though I never said to do that...it never asked if that's what I wanted to do...It just did it. Effectively nullifying the ability of StoreMI to work.
Why AMD can't do what a youtuber can in 5 minutes is beyond me...and pretty inexcusable. But I digress...
What I had to do was start over. Backed everything up, inserted my Windows 10 installation USB, booted from that, and ****-F10 into a command line from there.
From there, I cleaned all my drives.
Next, I physically removed my NVMe from the motherboard, then went about reinstalling the OS on the slow drive...now the only drive in the system, so it was forced to partition that.
Once that was done, and the OS was completely installed, I shut down the system and reinstalled the NVMe.
Rebooted the system, and I was then able to configure StoreMI easily.
TLDR: If you are doing a new system build, with a fresh Windows install, and want to use StoreMI... My recommendation is to install ONLY one HDD into your system (AMD recommends the install take place on the slowest drive). Complete your Windows install, then install the remaining drive or drives (you can only use two drives with StoreMI), install StoreMI and configure.

Related

Is it possible to fix my USB that can't even be read by Disk Management

I'm not sure if this is a duplicate, but every time I find a thread about corrupted USB, disk management is still at least able to recognize a drive. My USB is so bricked that when I try to use disk management, nothing loads. When I unplug it the other disks load fine, but once I plug it in and refresh the program hangs. Same things happens when I run diskpart and when I use any other third party disk managing software. Is this USB just completely FUBAR or can I raise it from the dead? Device manager recognizes a USB is plugged in, but that's about as much as Windows can do. I'm running Win10 64-bit version 1809 build 17763.1217. If there is any other info I can provide please let me know. Thanks for the help in advance.

Windows 10 Installation on a SSD error: " We couldn't create a new partition..."

I have an Acer Nitro 5 with a Gigabyte 512gb ssd and a WD 1TB hhd.
Recently after installing Ubuntu on my hdd (because i didn't want to change the sata mode), I also wanted a clean Windows install. So I created a boot usb from
media creation tool and go forward with it.
It didn't work. I got the "We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one" error, which i spent a significant amount of time trying to search for a solution.
Stuffs i tried:
- Format my ssd
- use diskpart to clean, convert my ssd partition table to gpt, etc like every guide online recommends.
- Make another boot usb, this time with rufus. Didn't work.
Stuffs I didn't try:
- Temporarily disconnect my hdd. I don't have the tools to do that physically, and my acer uefi has zero options regarding this, like most guides suggests.
- Change to bios-legacy boot mode. There's no option in the uefi.
I think it would be fine if i try to install windows on my hdd though, but haven't try it yet. All I know is installing windows on a ssd is much harder but didn't expect it to produce this much annoyance.
I heard there's an option to install on a HDD, the. use a third party tool to copy it to a SSD, but i haven't look into it.
Thanks for any help given..
Assuming you have Windows 10 installed and working on your SSD go to Settings > Update & Security > Recovery > Reset this PC > Get started and then select if you want your files kept you want clean reinstall. Again - from your post I assume the latter so just click Remove everything" confirm and wait. It will take (depending on the machine) 1-2 hours.
I've found this to be the easiest way to have clean install without wondering how do I get it installed on my laptop/pc.
My recommendation though - back up your ubuntu partition - I can't guarantee that windows installer won't clean up HDD you have (it's supposed to clean only SSD but better be safe than sorry).
Here's the link to detailed instructions. It's based on 1903 compilation - if your's older it will still look very similar.
If your windows isn't working then use diskpart to clean the drive, boot the computer from USB windows installation stick and choose the drive for your installation - it will/should create appropriate partitions and start installing.
If it won't change boot order so the SSD is first on the list and HDD next and repeat the previous step.

will Windows 10 be activated if installed on a laptop that used to have it preinstalled, from an external medium like a DVD or flash?

I accidentally wiped-clean my Toshiba Satellite's hard drive, including the recovery partition and the preloaded Windows 10 that was stored on it. Now, the only option I believe I have is to download the ISO, burn it to a DVD or flash, boot the laptop from it and install Windows 10.
If so:
Will Windows 10 be automatically activated ?
Will Windows detect the laptop is one with preloaded copy of Windows and as such license it automatically ?
I don't have any product activation code, the only code printed on the laptop floor is the laptop's serial number...
Thanks.
Anecdotally, the same thing just happened to me. I deleted all partitions and re-installed it completely fresh on a Dell Latitude laptop, figuring I'd lost the license.
In my case, the laptop is licensed just fine. I didn't do anything specific to license it.
As a side note, The ISO I downloaded didn't specify version, though it defaulted to Windows 10 Professional before when I used it on a custom-built machine. This one defaulted to Windows 10 Home, something I also didn't specify. I don't remember for sure which version I had before I nuked it.

copying an Apple Mac Hard Drive from a dead mac?

I have little experience with macs so I thought I would ask a quick question before I go ahead with this.
My friend's 6 year old mac desktop died the other day, she took it into the tech guys at the apple store to find out if she can get her documents back and they said no because the hard drive is in a different code you can't take it out.
That sounds like a load of crap to me so I want to rip out the hard drive and plug it into my PC then copy everything over. I also have access to linux if I need to.
So is there anything I need to know before doing this?
Thanks!
Assuming the hard drive itself isn't dead, you can get your hands on something like Ubuntu and copy all the files onto a different hard drive. You usually can't do this from windows because windows uses NTFS file system and will not recognize the mac file system (HFS or HFSPlus). Most flavors of linux can recognize mac hard drives and copy the contents. There can be some tricks with ownership of the files so here's a good post on how to do this in ubuntu:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-852144.html
Hope that helps!
If your friend plans on buying a new Mac, you should keep the disk itself; with an external HDD enclosure, a new machine (or a new OSX installation) will be able to migrate basically everything from the old drive.
Late answer, I know, but I just rescued a broken mac disk using dd_rescue, booting Trinity 3.4 on a HP and cloning the broken disk to a working disk. Then I popped the working disk into a working mac and hey presto, the user got the files back.

Recover windows seven

I started on Ubuntu and have had the first considerable error. I'm looking for help.
I have an HP Pavilion dv6 i7. I had installed windows 7 and I decided to also install Ubuntu using a USB.
My first attempt was to install Ubuntu 11.10 following the instructions of the official Ubuntu website. When loading the pendrive, my PC stucks at the main menu of ubuntu, so after searching, I found could be due to a problem with my AMD Radeon graphic card (or not), but I decided to change.
Then I used Ubuntu 10.4. This could happen from the start menu i get into Ubuntu live. There I decided to install it because I liked it and I need to develope with Google TV (in windows is not posible).
And I fail in the partitions section. I tried to follow the instructions on this page:
http://hadesbego.blogspot.com/2010/08/instalando-linux-en-hp-pavilion-dv6.html
but there were things that changed a bit so I improvised. I took the windows partition of 700000MB and went to 600000Mb leaving 100GB free to install Linux there. The error was to set it to ext3 (it was ntfs). I thought the new 100gb partition will be set to ext3, and windows partition will stuck at ntfs system, but not.
Total I ran out to boot windows, and above I can not install ubuntu on the 100GB free.
Someone thinks I can help. Is there any easy way to convert back to ntfs windows and not lose data?
Thank you very much.
You should be able to hit F11 when the machine is booting up and go to the HP recovery application. This should let you reset to factory default.
You should definitely be able to install Ubuntu on the new 100GB partition as well. Just make sure you choose the right partition to install it on.
You will need to recover using recovery CD/DVD's. You must have been using the install gparted utility in Linux to "re-partition" your drive. You scrubbed some boot files.
If you successfully recover using the recovery media you can use Disk Management in Win 7 to shrink or extend your volume. In your case you would shrink it down 100Gb's and then when installing Linux gparted will see that available 100 GB and install there while Windows will still run.
Also, you should probably be running ext4 fs, not ext3. you would only want ext3 for compatibility reasons.

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