"Computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk" when trying to install Windows 10

I have a laptop that originally came with Windows 10; the hard drive is now completely empty, and using Gparted, it's been formatted as a single, empty NTFS partition with an msdos partition table. When I try to install the Windows 10 ISO, I get to the partitioning dialog and receive this error:

Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu.

I know the hardware supports booting to this disk because it booted Windows from the disk when I bought it. I've tried both enabling and disabling UEFI and/or Legacy/CSM boot in the BIOS, and neither makes a difference. The hard drive is an NVMe SSD drive.

How do I get Windows 10 back on this machine? I saw this similar question, but that was an issue with extended vs. logical partitions, which doesn't apply here because there is just a single NTFS partition. Using the "Format" option in the Windows installer doesn't change the situation either.

(I created the Windows 10 USB with this procedure, but I don't think that's relevant because booting the USB isn't the problem)

Solution 1:

It's almost certain that the problem has something to do with the fact that you are trying to install to an NVMe drive:

In any case, the Next button is NOT greyed out. So you can try to press it and see if you can go on with the installation.

My guess is perhaps there is some sort of bug or defect in your UEFI implementation, that although it is capable of booting from an NVMe drive, it failed to report so (or it could be a bug to some UEFI in Windows as well). It could also be due to the EFI version (I mean the "spec version", not the "vendor version") of your UEFI too. I have no idea how exactly does the Windows installer determine whether to give you this warning.

So you can just try to go ahead with the installation. If there was really Windows installation on the drive and you had been booting it, I suppose it will boot after the installation is done.

Still, you may want to double or triple confirm that CSM is really disabled in your UEFI. (Alternatively, you may also want to leave it enabled, but just pick the right entry in the UEFI boot menu so that you boot the Windows installation media in UEFI mode but not BIOS/legacy mode.)

In my test with qemu/seabios, I see the following error once I press Next:

However, this may not necessarily be your case.

As oppose to what everyone else said/guaranteed, it has nothing to do with BIOS/GPT:

or UEFI/MBR:

Also, the installer will not show the error in either case if there is no partition existing on the drive (and the MSR partition on GPT disk doesn't even count here), even if the disk is so called "initialized". The reason is Windows (Setup) consider it safe to convert the partitioning style if the drive is considered "empty", so Windows Setup will just convert automatically.