Clean Install Windows 10 partition issue

Hey, here's what went down w/ my laptop:

It's a Windows 10 ASUS X540UA-DS51 laptop.

The hard drive got corrupted, to the point where it cannot even recognize that there's a C: drive, only the emergency X: drive (I know it's part of the C: drive). And no, I did not back up anything. My fault.

I already put a windows 10 installer on my external hard drive.

Here's the thing:

I was following a tutorial on how to clean install. It said to remove all partitions of the hard drive in order for an unallocated space partition to appear, and I remove all of them as told, and the only thing that remained was my external hard drive partition.

But it's weird. Sometimes when I restart, either:

• All partitions for disk 0 either miraculously reappear
• Just one disk 0 partition for unallocated space, except for the fact that the partition is 0.0mb.

Either way, there are 2 common problems:

• When I refresh, all instances of disk 0 partitions disappear, leaving me with the disk 1 (external hard drive) partitions
• When I click the New button (only available if there's only a drive 0 unallocated space partition of 0.0mb) and attempt to put in a predetermined amount of megabytes (I kno u're supposed to put it gigabyte amounts, just converted into mb), the computer insists that I need to chose 0mb in order to create a new partition, and even then I still can't select apply.

I'll break it down:

GOOD:

• Laptop can boot.
• Can press esc to bring up the boot option menu to either my ext. hard drive, Windows 10 (just the WinRE), or ASUS BIOS UEFI.
• Can access the WinRE menu.
• Can access diskpart.
• Diskpart can clean the disk.
  
  • What it shows for disk 0 (internal hard drive) & disk 1 (external hard drive) for list disk:

• What it shows for list volume (I think the last volume/volume 4 is the ext. hard drive):

• What it shows for list partition (after selecting disk 0):

• Can get to the Windows 10 setup.
• Even tho I deleted the partitions, they miraculously reappear after several bootups

WEIRD:

• Seems to consider what's supposed to be the C: drive the "D:" drive, and substitutes my external hard drive as a "C:" drive.

BAD:

• Computer usually takes a WHILE to boot up. Sometimes I have to turn off and try again if nothing shows.
  • Is this a remnant trait of previous hard drive corruption? (I swore it mighta been a display driver issue, as I was able to go on my regular desktop one last time, but it was incredibly laggy and there was scrambled text under shortcut icons, windows explorer, etc.)
• Cannot use chkdsk.
• Diskpart cannot create a partition
• Diskpart cannot format a volume
• The 'format fs=ntfs' and 'format fs=ntfs quick' diskpart inputs don't work
• None of the disk 0 partitions are usable.
• Unable to use system restore
• Unable to go to previous version
• Unable to use startup repair
• Unable to use system image recovery
• Startup options is gone.
• Can't format any of the disk 0 partitions, whether it be the Windows Setup or the cmd prompt. In fact, it shows that it's "Error: 0x80070057".
• The message "Windows can't be installed on drive 0 partition X." shows up for every drive 0 partition, except the third one. Here's the info:

• Clicking Refresh removes all instances of Drive 0's partitions. If I 1st delete all drive 0 partitions, turn off the laptop, and then boot on the computer again and return to the "Where do you want to install Windows" step during Windows Setup, it shows a Drive 0 Unallocated space, except both total size and free space are 0.0mb. This cycle of weirdness comes full circle when I turn off & turn on the laptop only to find all 4 drive 0 partitions back on the menu again.
  • A small "Good": When there's only unallocated space available for drive 0, the New button is selectable...
  • ...Only to find out I cannot make another partition. Windows 10 insists that 0.0mb is the way to go for a partition, except even setting it zero still does nothing (of course). them at first, all 4 partitions of disk 0 still pop somehow.
• My ASUS laptop has an optic drive, but because of its current state, it is unable to open up.
• Upgrade to Windows 10 option (yes, I tried it, even tho Windows 10 is already in the hard drive) doesn't work.

UNSURE:

• Unable to convert GPT to MBE. I know GPT is pretty much the "UEFI" to how MBE is pretty much the "BIOS" in a sense, it terms of new and old software. Not even sure if this is the source of the issue.
• Load driver option under "Where do you want to install Windows?" menu is unselectable. Don't think I need to use this.
• Extend option is same as above, except I'm unsure if I need to use it.
• When I use diskpart to list vdisk, there are no virtual disks to show. Not sure if this needed for my situation.

I got some questions:

• How can I make a valid partition in order to proceed the clean install?
• I heard that you may need to unplug your ext. hard drive (the same one that contains the windows 10 install media) at some point. At what point do I unplug my external hard drive exactly? The moment after I get past the partition step? When I unplug before the partition step, the installation requests me to have a media driver inserted...
  • What's strange is this: There's a note that states that if the install media is in the DVD drive or USB drive (which it is), you can safely remove it for this step. Which I did...so now I'm unable to get past the "Select the driver to install" screen...
  • ...unless I go back to the windows 10 setup, plug my ext. drive back in, and return to the partition issue once more.
• I see that there's a Product Key step that's supposed to occur before the partition setup. I have never seen that window pop-up yet during all my attempts to install Windows 10 onto my ASUS laptop. Is it because my product key is still intact? I'm guessing I can see it when I boot up the ASUS UEFI BIOS?

Other notes:

I'm using my older HP laptop to type this up, & it was also used to install the media creation tool onto my external hard drive.

AS OF NOW:

Windows Setup is....setup on my laptop.

The 4 Drive 0 partitions are up on the "Where do you want to install Windows?" step.

The message "We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one. For more information, see the Setup log files." is sitting at the bottom of the window thereafter I selected drive 0 partition 3 and attempted to click Next.