Hey! They asked me to install Windows 10 on a really old PC. I downloaded it from the Microsoft website, directly with their assistant, which saved it to the USB drive. When trying to boot, I get this error in the screenshot. What could it be? Do you think it’d be better to try installing another version of Windows? Like Windows 7?
Usually these older PCs don’t boot from a USB drive.
Also, what year is this PC from?
I don’t know the year. But the Windows on it is XP.
I wouldn’t recommend installing Windows 10 on older PCs, especially if they have an HDD instead of an SSD…
What processor does this computer have?
From what I can tell from this photo you sent, it’s a PC without USB3… it must be from the same era as the Athlon 64 X2 I installed an SSD in the other day. (Though depending, it could be a Xeon from AliExpress. Who knows.)
You need to make a boot disk in BIOS style, not UEFI.
Dude, does this PC have an SSD? It’s a terrible idea to install Windows 10 on a PC without an SSD. Especially when the HDD is old… (I have an IDE HDD with 4MBps read/write…)
The official MS tool is not ideal. Use Rufus and download the ISO from MS. In Rufus you need to change from UEFI to BIOS.
I have an old notebook here, and even using Rufus I couldn’t get it to recognize it. The solution was to use Serva to install over the network — by the way, that became my favorite method of installing an OS.
You have to make a bootable USB drive in BIOS, not UEFI.
Sometimes in BIOS you need to force the USB drive to be recognized as an HDD or optical drive.
Maybe that was it, because I did do the part about setting it in the BIOS. But after that it still wasn’t recognized, and at least I couldn’t find any option in the BIOS that would make it recognize the flash drive as a hard drive.
On Disk Master it says ATA. Is the hard drive on this old PC IDE or SATA? If it’s SATA, check the BIOS for an option to set the SATA Mode to AHCI. If it’s there, select that option and save.
If it’s an IDE hard drive, you’ll need to use Rufus or similar software to create a bootable USB drive in MBR.
But like the folks here have already said. Installing Windows 10 on a PC without an SSD is asking for trouble. Especially an old one.
To answer your question directly, the pendrive was not recognized as a bootable device to start the installation. Now, regarding Windows 10 on older PCs, could you post the specs here so folks can help out!
It works, alright. But it’s painfully slow.
Unfortunately it’s true, using Windows 10 on an HDD borders on masochism. But if there’s no other way, use Rufus to create bootable media in MBR+BIOS mode and not GPT+UEFI.
Do you want to see pain? Get a PC, shove an 80GB PATA hard drive in it, and install Windows 10 with 4GB of RAM.
Like Multilaser and Positivo putting Windows 10 on a notebook with 2 GB RAM and an old Celeron/Atom… 
The installation itself is way too looooooooong
If I were you, I’d put a Linux with a Windows 10 skin on it. It’ll give you less of a headache than the same people who asked you to install it complaining in a few days that it’s not good for anything…