Win10 does not support Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive!

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Yesterday, after making win7 rescue CD and doing full backup to external 5tb drive via USB (but not an image backup, unfortunately), I ran chkdsk on each of the 3 drives in my Asus Laptop, fixed a few cross-linked clusters, then….allowed Windows 10 upgrade to proceed. It FAILED BIGTIME. After lengthy dl, process began, and it ran for an hour or more, finally booting, and then displaying a count-up number in a circle as it “installed windows”….at 25% I went to do chores. Came back in an hour, and blank screen except for one line: Missing operating system.
I have discovered by talking with WD tech that they do not support windows 10. MS does not include whatever drivers are needed to recognize the 120gb SSD portion of the SSD/HDD Dual drive in the Black2 product. My Win7 Ultimate was of course, installed on the SSD and is now theoretically all bundled up into the .old file, and the laptop cannot see the SSD. I also have a 2 TB seagate in the second drive bay of this laptop.
I made a win7 rescue CD just prior to beginning. It cannot do anything beneficial. IF I go to dos prompt, I can view the Black2’s HDD, but it does not show the SSD C: drive, although it knows it is there. It also cannot access the memory card slot, though it can see (I think) the usb port, so I can theoretically create a rufus boot USB with an iso for win7 reinstall, BUT….
Are there any known ways to UNDO manually the damage done? IOW, fix the win7 MBR, erase the stuff installed yesterday, unpack the windows.old et al?
I would REALLY like to NOT have to rebuild from scratch if I can avoid it.
The win7 DVD I have is an upgrade DVD, which presents a real headscratcher, as I probably do not have an XP DVD any more. Is there an iso file I could download, and then be able to use the KEY from my upgrade DVD?
Any and all advice welcomed! Especially if it helps me avoid having to reinstall all the applications and reactivate them in order to get back to normal.

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Without an image backup I think you are stuck doing a reinstall from scratch. I do not know of a way to revert if the Win10 upgrade does not finish.

Joe

--Joe

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Without an image backup I think you are stuck doing a reinstall from scratch. I do not know of a way to revert if the Win10 upgrade does not finish. k to Joe

It just keeps getting better. on inspection, I realize the Win7 Ultimate CD is an “upgrade only”. The original OS for the laptop was OEM, Ausus, for 7 home. No CDs sent, it was on a hidden partition, I bet. I probably have the original drive, and that partition might still exist. I can’t download the ISO from Microsoft for EITHER os, since their page complains that one is OEM (go talk to the asus people), and the other is an academic-purchased copy when I was an archery coach at UT, and the MS academic download page complains that the key is for an enterprise even though I purchased it through the UT Computer store. Right Now, I can’t do anything to move this forward. I left a request with MS tech support to call back, the system said 144 minutes delay, it’s been 4 hours and no call.
I’m going to have to find an old XP install disk (and pray it wasn’t an “upgrade” version, try to install that on the asus, then use the DVD win7 to get back to a live system. I’m in a state of shock over how much work I made for myself, by trusting MS. I know better. I really do. What was I thinking….? Their “you have 30 days, in which you can go back to your original state” suckered me, and their pre-install process that evaluated my system and said it would support 10, obviously was BS. What I wouldn’t give for a real Win 7 ultimate install on a bootable USB drive right now…

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…
I’m going to have to find an old XP install disk (and pray it wasn’t an “upgrade” version, try to install that on the asus, then use the DVD win7 to get back to a live system…

You can use a Win7 “upgrade” installation DVD to perform a clean install. Otherwise it would not be possible to upgrade from XP to Win7, since they are entirely different operating systems.

You could create a Win10 installation DVD or USB (on another computer) using the “media creation tool” and use that to see if it can repair or roll back the failed Win10 install.

32bit version: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=616935

64bit version: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=616936

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UPDATE FOR POSTERITY, AND ANYONE SEARCHING THE RIGHT TERMS PRIOR TO TRYING THE WIN10 UPGRADE WITH THIS DRIVE INSTALLED.
The way that WD partitioned/set up the boot record in the Dual Drive is not supported at present by Windows 10, and WD tech support says that they do not support windows 10 for this dual drive either. That windows 10’s install routine which apparently checks the system for compatibility could not/did not check the hard drive and report it was incompatible, despite being on the market for several years, is criminal but unsurprising. As I said, I should know better than to trust a .0 release from MS. Just thankful that I had done a full, thorough backup of my entire 3 TB (+ 120gb) storage media in this ASUS laptop prior to attempting this. It is also on me that I did not specifically go search the MS site for a summary of all supported drives. (There is NO list of “unsupported drives”) I probably would have seen that the WD “Black” drives ARE supported, and gone ahead anyway, not realizing that the Dual Drive is a “Black2”, not a “Black”.

I was unable to find anyone at MS (2 levels of techies and 4 phone conversations) who could help me “roll back” what windows 10 did to my 120gb SSD boot drive. After a little more than 2 days, I have reinstalled/rebuilt the entire system, and have most of the licensed products re-keyed and activated. I’ve also done an image backup of the drive to retired smaller hard drive, and made a thumbdrive bootable and put a copy of the win7 ultimate CD on it via xcopy. I have a purchased, licensed copy but MS techs on the refused to acknowledge the key is a legitimate key. I am unable to use the key to download the win7 ultimate 64bit iso file from MS, the primary portal tells me that the key is an enterprise key, and the academic portal (which is only found if you happen to scan through their FAQ) tells me that it is not an academic key/license (despite me buying it from the computer store at the U of Texas under my position as an employee there. Funny, the key activates the install I did just fine. Typical.

The ONLY ray of sunshine was that I did NOT have to install my original Win XP OS from CD, in order to reinstall my Win7 Ultimate Upgrade CD. For some reason, it did not demand such, so it must have found “something” on that boot drive that indicated there was a copy of windows already on it. I did NOT run the WD utility as directed by their techies to “write zeroes” to the drive to wipe it first. . Hope this message in a bottle helps someone else avoid the pain and aggravation in the future. I noticed the last time I was in trouble, and logged in here for help, was 2009. Hope I can make it another 6 years before I screw up again.

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