Broken Dell Inspiron

J_B

debitcardmayhem said:

You shuld be able to run diskpart from the command prompt in the intall repair environment. Google diskpart format disk bitlocker

(tencharacters)

EDIT: Just a minute ... I removed the quick from "format fs=fat32" and it's doing something now .... 18% completed 🤞

EDIT #2: it went all the way to 97% so I went for a brew and came back to "volume size is too big" again!

debitcardmayhem

Don't know why you chose fat32. however lets go back to basics , try select disk 0 (again) and clean (again). Next do - convert gpt.

Now run the install  again. It should work i.e. it will ask you to use disk 0 and trundle along, but who knows !!!

J_B

debitcardmayhem said:

Don't know why you chose fat32. however lets go back to basics , try select disk 0 (again) and clean (again). Next do - convert gpt.

I chose fat32 because that's what the googled page suggested.

Not sure what I've done now but can only get as far as BIOS now.  🤦‍♂️

Would I be better waiting for Amazon arrival tomorrow?

J_B

debitcardmayhem said:

Now run the install  again. It should work i.e. it will ask you to use disk 0 and trundle along, but who knows !!!

I've tried the install (from USB) again, but it still can't see the main drive

J_B

Still bad news sadly.

M2/USB adapter arrived. I removed M2 from laptop and connected it to my PC. It wanted me to format the disk, which I did (Full Format - NTFS)

Put it back in and started laptop with W11 USB in it, but it's still not seeing the M2 drive.

Does it need taking to a computer shop for further examination or can 'we' fix it?

The only error on start up now is that it's using a 45w charger and should be using a 65w one

All suggestions gratefully received!

km1500

put it back connected to your pc.

use disk manager to delete all partitions on it, including the bitlocker partition

put it back.in laptop

go to bios - see if disk is recognised.

if not you have a disk problem

if yes, try again boot from W11

if not there you may need drivers that are not on W11 stick

once possibility - back into.bios, check if you have RAID mode - if so, turn it off as you will need RAID drivers otherwise. I have come across this problem before on Dell

J_B

km1500 said:

put it back connected to your pc.

use disk manager to delete all partitions on it, including the bitlocker partition

I think that by formatting it yesterday, there are no partitions

I don't want to delete any partitions on my own PC

J_B

km1500 said:

put it back connected to your pc.

use disk manager to delete all partitions on it, including the bitlocker partition

put it back.in laptop

go to bios - see if disk is recognised.

if not you have a disk problem

if yes, try again boot from W11

if not there you may need drivers that are not on W11 stick

once possibility - back into.bios, check if you have RAID mode - if so, turn it off as you will need RAID drivers otherwise. I have come across this problem before on Dell

I've turned RAID off and now W11 install can see the M2 disk but it's showing as Drive 0 which it says 'can't install on 0'

I deleted the drive and it's still called 0, but is now installing 🤞🤞🤞

J_B

Bonhomie said:

There's an Eleven forum: https://www.elevenforum.com/t/clean-install-windows-11.99/

                                          https://www.elevenforum.com/t/install-windows-11-home-using-local-account.23/

This is the bit that got me past the 'log into MS account' bit ......

<<Tried a few more iterations of this and I have some more info. It does have to be an existing Microsoft account. When I tried a new install with an account name of something like "RandomAccount@xcz.com" it told me that this account does not exist. But when I tried "x@x.com" it asked for a password. I supplied a random password and that's when I got the "Oops, something went wrong" along with a message that the wrong password was entered too often and was then allowed to supply a local account name.>>

J_B

Anyway - the job's finally done.

Thanks to everyone who tried to help and especially to @km1500 for the bit about turning RAID off

Just one error message that I've said 'don't ask again.

He had to buy a replacement generic charger which is 45w whereas the bios suggested that we ought to use a 65w one.

Does it matter?