This is a new one for me!

I bought several used identical 300gg WD Velociraptor hard drives. I was building a system today with used components and when the Windows 10 installation got to the point of putting stuff on the drive I got this message: Windows cannot install to this drive. Your computer's hardware may not support booting to this drive." Or something like that. You could see the drive listed in the Windows' drive picker window but the error message wouldn't let me proceed. This was on a socket AM3 Asus enthusiast level motherboard. I fiddled with the storage settings a long time in bios trying this and that but could not get it to work. Finally, I swapped the drive out for an identical one and Windows 10 installed without a hitch. Crystaldiskinfo reported no problems with the SMART data on the first drive. I guess I learned from this that a hard drive has components that interact with the motherboard disk controller and that they can go bad without the drive failing in the usual ways.

Anyone ever have an experience like this?

Was the drive initialized and formatted?

Yes. Drive was initialized and formatted.

Problem solved.

It turned out to be a bad SATA power connector, either the one coming from the PSU or the "Y" spitter I added to it to power both the optical drive and the HD from the same lead. Just a cheap PSU so the lead may be bad or that rail is sub par.

It's nice when it's the easy stuff to fix.

Yep, but it's so easy to overlook the basic stuff 'cause it doesn't very often go wrong.

So true.