Windows 10 from USB recovery media reinstall fail

roytom2

I have an ASUS Vivobook X510U A from early 2019. The cpu is an Intel i5 8th generation. Windows has been running very sluggish for a while so I decided to do a total wipe of the hard disc and reinstalling Windows 10, which took all of last night.
Today the install seemed to have progressed ok but on first start up I get the following message…

Location is not available C:\\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\Desktop is unavailable. If the location is on this PC, make sure that the device or drive is Connected or the disc is inserted, then try again. It the location is on a network, make sure that you’re connected to the network or Internet, then try again. If the location still can’t be found, it might have been moved or deleted…

No I didn’t do anything and nothing works. Rebooting doesn’t change anything. Any ideas?

TIA

facade

Your hard disc has died, which is why windows had gone so slow in the first place, especially if it took all night to install?

I have a vague idea that the x510 can have an SSD and a hard disc, have you installed windows to the one that doesn't boot?

I'd suspect the hard disc though, can you boot into bios and check what is installed?

roytom2

Thanks, it’s well possible that there’s a hard drive issue. It only has one hard drive and no SSD installed, I’ve never opened the laptop up.
Does anyone know where I can get the right SSD for it? The duff original hard drive is 1tb but the SSD can be smaller.
thanks again 

facade

You can get a 2.5" SSD to replace the harddrive. A 500gb will do. Then windows will just install to it and sort itself out.

I have an idea that they only accept M2 SATA drives, which are horrendously expensive compared to the NVme ones.

(The picture I found shows a n M2 with 2 keyslots, which is SATA.

Newcad

That particular Asus model should have M2 SSD for the Operating System (Windows), and a HDD for data storage.

https://www.asus.com/uk/laptops/for-home/vivobook/asus-vivobook-15-x510ua/

They should actually run without the HDD in there, but probably would run out of storage space.
Which may in fact be what your issue is, if there is no HDD in yours (or there is but it's failed) then you may be running out of space on the M2 SSD.
See the video below, it doesn't have one in there and he fits one.

Here's a decent video on how to change/upgrade the SSD, HDD, and RAM on those X510U laptops:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XUbVWQQiN0&ab_channel=ToxicNerd

Of course you could put a SATA SSD in place of the HDD 'spinning disc'.

Before that though I'd download a new installer for Windows 10 from here, and try doing a fresh install on the machine as it stands:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10
(Why buy new drives if they are not needed, unless you want to upgrade, or the drive has actually failed).

Use "Create Windows !0 installation media" > "Use the tool to create media ... to install Windows 10 on a different PC ..."
You'll need a USB with at least 8GB capacity - it will get wiped to create the media.

Then see "Using the installation media you created ..." for how to do a clean install of Win 10.

km1500

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.minitool.com/backup-tips/system32-config-systemprofile-desktop-unavailable.html?amp

Paradigm

Newcad said:

That particular Asus model should have M2 SSD for the Operating System (Windows), and a HDD for data storage.

That's the impression I had. If the OP can't run windows they need to access the BIOS to make sure there is only 1 drive & the boot order if there is more than 1 drive installed.

roytom2

This whole situation is more complex than I imaged.
This ASUS X510U A has in effect 2 drives, one is an SSD (on the main board) of 16GB Intel Optane Memory, and of course the spinning hard disc of 1TB.
But now Windows 10 won’t run and the USB Recovery Drive won’t run either.
I suspect that the windows partition on the 16GB drive could be corrupted (there’s also a small EFI partition on it which I don’t think it’s using?). 

However, the hard drive has the Windows Boot Manager on its own EFI partition - could Windows have accidentally installed its Boot Manager in the wrong place?
It’s not clear why windows recovery installer (created on this laptop when new) can’t sort this out.
Any further help appreciated.
many thanks 

Paradigm

Ok, follow Newcads advice above & create a new windows install usb, see if that boots. If it does make sure you install to the ssd.

It's possible that windows installed to the wrong drive.

roytom2

Thanks for all the excellent advice - following Newcads' advice, I was able to download a copy of Windows 10 and the install worked very well. There was some confusion about which drive I needed to use and some partitions needed to be deleted before a new partition could be added as the main Windows 10 destination (Disk 0, 930.77GB). It did create some other smaller EFI partitions on Disk 0 too. I wonder why it needed to create 2 on the spinning hard drive?
It identified the spinning hard drive as Disk 0 and the SSD 16GB drive as Disk 1, which also has 2 EFI partitions on it. Out of interest it didn't use the space left on the SSD of 12.82GB presumably as it was too small to be of use.
Thanks again

Paradigm

So you've installed to Disk 0 & not the SSD? Not the best, slower, but good enough As long as it boots & is useable that can be sorted later if needed.

Windows does create 3-4 small partitions, nothing to worry about.

The SSD 16gb thing is Intel Optane reserved space (asfaik), the actual disk will be bigger....click start, type disk management & it should show the correct disk info/partions.