Trick when W10 won't install on B450-HDV

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   I tried in vain to install Windows 10 (64-bit) on a B450-HDV.  I don't have it
here, but here's what I remember of its specs:

Ryzen 5 3500 (IIRC)
8GB RAM
SATA SSD 240GB

The Windows 10 install (very recent download) kept asking for drivers without specifying WHAT driver it was looking for!  I kept feeding it drivers from ASROCK, but the Windows install didn't find any.  I pressed F8 and tried the Repair button to get a CMD.EXE window, but it couldn't execute the self-extracting .EXE driver files supplied by ASROCK ????!?!?!?!?!!!

I installed an NVIDIA graphics board (about 5 years old) to make sure
that the built-in AMD GPU stuff didn't cause any issues, but no change: Windows 10 install still kept asking for drivers I couldn't find.

Instead, I installed Windows 10 in a virtual machine on my Linux machine.
Since I was low on disk space on my Linux machine, the VirtualBox .vdi file was only 25GB instead of being matched to the size of the SSD on the target machine (240GB).  It had three partitions: 1=500MB Windows boot, 2=Windows, 3=recovery (also 500MB).

On my Linux machine, I cloned the .vdi file to a disk image file and copied that image file to the entire SSD (using the dd command, i.e. a raw copy) and then put the SSD back into the target B450-HDV machine.  It booted with very low resolution and crashed after a minute or so.

I kept booting it, and suddenly the screen resolution went up to the display max: Windows 10 had -- in the background -- magically installed an NVIDIA driver somehow.   After that, Windows 10 never crashed again.  Then it was time to install
the AMD GPU drivers, but Windows complained that too little disk space was left of the 25GB I had given it. I connected the SSD to my Linux machine again and ran fdisk to create a new (primary!) 500MB partition (4) at the end of the SSD (500MB was 1024000 sectors, so partition 4 began at <disksize-in-sectors> MINUS 1024000 sectors.  Then I used the dd command to copy partition 3 to partition 4. In fdisk I deleted partition 3 to make the large space between partition 2 and 4 available to expand the Windows partition (2).  I installed the Windows program DiskGenius and expanded partition 2 to occupy the space that was just freed, and rebooted.  And voil? the Windows partition now occupies almost the whole disk!

Hope someone found this useful.

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mathiasbage Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 26 Dec 2020 Location: Sweden Status: Offline Points: 3	Post Options Post Reply Quote mathiasbage Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: Trick when W10 won't install on B450-HDV Posted: 27 Dec 2020 at 5:04am
	I tried in vain to install Windows 10 (64-bit) on a B450-HDV. I don't have it here, but here's what I remember of its specs: Ryzen 5 3500 (IIRC) 8GB RAM SATA SSD 240GB The Windows 10 install (very recent download) kept asking for drivers without specifying WHAT driver it was looking for! I kept feeding it drivers from ASROCK, but the Windows install didn't find any. I pressed F8 and tried the Repair button to get a CMD.EXE window, but it couldn't execute the self-extracting .EXE driver files supplied by ASROCK ????!?!?!?!?!!! I installed an NVIDIA graphics board (about 5 years old) to make sure that the built-in AMD GPU stuff didn't cause any issues, but no change: Windows 10 install still kept asking for drivers I couldn't find. Instead, I installed Windows 10 in a virtual machine on my Linux machine. Since I was low on disk space on my Linux machine, the VirtualBox .vdi file was only 25GB instead of being matched to the size of the SSD on the target machine (240GB). It had three partitions: 1=500MB Windows boot, 2=Windows, 3=recovery (also 500MB). On my Linux machine, I cloned the .vdi file to a disk image file and copied that image file to the entire SSD (using the dd command, i.e. a raw copy) and then put the SSD back into the target B450-HDV machine. It booted with very low resolution and crashed after a minute or so. I kept booting it, and suddenly the screen resolution went up to the display max: Windows 10 had -- in the background -- magically installed an NVIDIA driver somehow. After that, Windows 10 never crashed again. Then it was time to install the AMD GPU drivers, but Windows complained that too little disk space was left of the 25GB I had given it. I connected the SSD to my Linux machine again and ran fdisk to create a new (primary!) 500MB partition (4) at the end of the SSD (500MB was 1024000 sectors, so partition 4 began at <disksize-in-sectors> MINUS 1024000 sectors. Then I used the dd command to copy partition 3 to partition 4. In fdisk I deleted partition 3 to make the large space between partition 2 and 4 available to expand the Windows partition (2). I installed the Windows program DiskGenius and expanded partition 2 to occupy the space that was just freed, and rebooted. And voil? the Windows partition now occupies almost the whole disk! Hope someone found this useful.