So, here's what happened. I plugged in a bootable W10 installation thumbdrive. After deleting two preexisting partitions that I had made manually, the installer created a reserved system partition (partition 0), and a normal storage partition (partition 1). After this, it began installing Windows 10 on the HDD. However, it was stuck on 0% on "Preparing files for installation." Because of this, I exited setup, and tried the process again. After I selected the Custom installation, I see "Drive 0 Partition 1: System Reserved," and "Drive 0 Partition 2." I tried installing it on the second partition, but it brought up the error message, Windows could not format a partition on disk 0. The error occurred while preparing the partition selected for installation. Error Code 0x80070057.
After this, I tried restarting the installation, and format the partition with the UI format button. The following error message occurs: We couldn't format the selected partition. [Error: 0x80070057]
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After this, I tried to format both partitions with Diskpart. Both times, I was told that it couldn't be done because of an I/O error. When I tried to clear the disk and each of a partitions, it would happen again. Is there any way to fix these errors and install Windows?
Googling the error message turns up this Microsoft page that claims the error is caused by a bad pre-existing filesystem on the partition, and that the solution is to completely delete the partition and re-create it.
If you have problems even with that, I have two additional suggestions:
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