Having Trouble Getting A New Hard Drive Up And Running

[rrickerman]

Have a Toshiba and the hard drive went bad. Replaced with a new 1TB toshiba hard drive and tried to install the recovery drive.
Attached the recovery drive and started the computer. Tried the "reset this PC" and the following popped up "the drive where windows is installed is locked. unlock the drive and try again" Do not know how to unlock the drive - any suggestions? Then tried the "recover from a drive", "just remove my files". Should the drive be partitioned? If so, how is that done at this point?
After it was done I got this "there was a problem recovering your PC" Am at wits end as to how to make the new hard drive function. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Trouble]

Hello and welcome to the forum.

new 1TB toshiba hard drive and tried to install the recovery drive.

I think your first order of business should be to perform a clean custom install on the new hard drive.
You need to acquire the ISO and build the installation media.
The installation media can be obtained through either of these two resources.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/techbench
OR
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Once you have the ISO, you can use ImgBurn to burn it to a DVD or Rufus to burn it to a USB ThumbDrive, either of which you can use to boot your computer.

If the computer is reasonably new with GPT as opposed to MBR and UEFI as opposed to Legacy BIOS, you might want to take the steps to keep it that way.
I recommended using Rufus to burn it to a USB ThumbDrive http://rufus.akeo.ie/
And configure it as so..

For GPT / UEFI.....
For older hardware (Legacy BIOS) just change #2 to include MBR and #3 to NTFS

IF you still run into problems "drive is locked", then perhaps your earlier attempts at recovering from the recovery drive has left the new drive in a non-optimal state.
IF that is the case you can simply hold the shift key and strike the F10 key at the first page after booting from the installation media and use the command prompt window by typing
diskpart
hit enter
list disk
hit enter
select disk 0 (absolutely critical that you select the correct disk and only the disk you want to wipe in preperation of the clean install as the next step will remove all data and partition structure).
hit enter
clean
hit enter
exit
hit enter
exit
hit enter
resume installing.

 

[bun yippee]

... @ Trouble ... as a precaution i d/l the Rufus exe ... i already have the iso but should i instal straight from the zipped iso or from the setup exe within the iso ... will 8gb drive be enough ... ... cheers..