A couple weeks ago my mother notified me that she needed her laptop fixed and I undertook the challenge of trying to restore it. I was told that the laptop would not start up properly and after getting my hands on it, I noticed that the laptop would launch straight into system setup when powered on. After many long hours at school, I did what I was taught to do, to search the internet for an answer.
Turns out this is common in ASUS systems and it can be caused by a damaged hard drive or the hard drive is not properly connected. There was a solution available online to break the cycle of constantly loading into system setup which required me to change a couple settings in the setup utility.
After following those instructions, the system would try to find the OS but there was none installed on the local hard drive. My next step was to load an operating system onto the laptop, which would result in a “brand new” computer. Up to this point I had never tried to load an OS on a physical machine, only on virtual ones. Thus began another search on the Internet to find a way to do it.
Most of the solutions that were online were for PC yet I was working on a Mac. Although, Mac does support some of Windows’ file system formats so I went ahead and formatted the USB to the FAT file system. I attempted to copy the files from Windows 10 onto the USB when it gave me an error stating “File is too big for Volume’s format.”
After doing some research, FAT and ExFAT formats accept file sizes up to 4 GB. So working with a Mac was not going to be successful and I needed to get my hands on a Windows machine so I can format the USB to NTFS, Microsoft’s current file system. Thankfully, there is an inexpensive way to get a PC and that’s with Oracle’s VirtualBox. As mentioned before, I’ve worked with virtual machines and had set up a Windows 10 machine with relative ease. I had to configure the machine to recognize the specific USB connected to my physical computer which was painless.
The next step was to turn on the Windows machine and download Windows Media Creation Tool, which is provided by Microsoft for free, in order to format memory drives. I ran the tool and selected the specified USB drive and chose the NTFS format. After dragging and dropping the Windows 10 dmg file, another configurable setting for VirtualBox machines, I was able to successfully copy over all files with no errors. Finally, after a very long process, I was able to get the laptop to recognize the USB and load the OS onto its internal hard drive. And voíla, the laptop is able to boot up the OS!