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I have a Dell Inspiron 15 5000. It came with Windows 10 and I have installed Ubuntu 20 without formatting and partitioning.

Now I would like to put back Windows 10 because this is a company laptop. I have created a bootable USB with Windows 10. I am booting from the USB and the Windows setup is started. I am stuck on the below screen where there is no drive to install Windows.

enter image description here

I have an idea that I have to create a partition of format NTFS, but I am not sure if that is the right way and I do not want to damage the disk. Within the existing Ubuntu OS, I can see a partition that I think I can format, see screenshot below.

enter image description here

I am not sure how to continue, I need some guidance. I do not need any files from the Ubuntu OS, I would like to clean it and install Windows.

Edit

Is this the right way to format the disk?

enter image description here

teebo
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2 Answers2

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Just format the disk and don't create any partitions.

Choose the whole disk on the left side of the Disks application and then from the drop down choose "Format" and when it asks for the partition scheme, choose GPT. That's all you need to do.

Since the Windows installer will need to create several partitions it's better if the disk is totally empty.

Nmath
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The answer above was very helpful to solving this. One step that was missing was that I could not format the disk because it was being used. What I had to do was to create another bootable USB with Ubuntu and instead of installing it, I have selected "Try Ubuntu", once I was in Ubuntu, I then started the gparted application and I was able to format the disk.

After that, I still could not see the partition in the Windows installation setup.

What solved the issue was to change some settings in the BIOS setup > Storage>

Instead of having select RAID on I switch it to AHCI/NVMe . enter image description here

I don't even know what that means.

I am assuming the selection was changed by Ubuntu automatically when I first removed Windows and installed Ubuntu. After this I could see the partition in the Windows setup. I had to format it and create a new volume of the maximum disk size to be able to continue with the setup.

JFTR Downloading RAID drivers and having theM extracted driverfolders in the root of the Windows bootable USB could not solve the issue.

teebo
  • 128