A little help needed please

I am just about to do my 'Clean Install' of Windows 10. I was given the instructions shown below and I have disconnected the other drives and have restarted the machine, pressed F12 for the boot options and have requested it boot from the USB drive on which I downloaded the Windows 10 programme. However, when I have done this all I get is a black screen with a curser blinking in the top left hand corner. Am I doing something wrong. What I am trying to achieve is for the SSD to be wiped clean (formatted) of all the rubbish. many thanks for any help.

1. Temporarily disconnect all other HD/SSD except the one you plan to install Windows.
2. Disable Secure Boot in BIOS if enabled.
3. Boot up the PC with Windows Installation USB
4. On the first screen. Hold down SHIFT + F10. A command Windows will pop up.
5. Type: diskpart
6. select disk 0
7. clean
8. exit
9. exit
10. Continue with the installation, select Customize, click on Disk 0 then click Next, Windows Installation wil create all needed partitions then install the rest to the SSD

Hi,
You may have selected the boot order wrong, I have done it in the past as it was confusing, what I do normally is,insert the flash drive with OS and try switching the boot order, I have sandisk flash drive for booting and select the USB with Sandisk name on it in BIOS, you don't have to wipe clean your SSD as windows will wipe out everything as part of the installation process. HTH.

Hello brummyfan, are you a Bluenose?
I have just realised wher I am making a mistake, I am trying to boot the pc from the USB stick that only has the media creation tool on it doh!! What I have done now is open up the media creation tool to create the necessary item that I need but, the system is telling me that it can't find a USB drive and yet it is clearly showing as 'N' on my screen and, I can go into it and I have formatted it so I don't know what I am doing wrong. Should I copy the media creation tool from the 'downloads' on my pc, onto the USB stick first? Thanks for helping.

P.S. I don't think that I have 'Secure Boot' on my machine, although having said that, I'm not that certain. How can I tell?
P.P.S. I have just pressed F12 again and can see the following :-
Hard Drive Disk priority 1st Drive Samsung SSD - 2nd Drive SanDisk Cruzer USB

There is also a line that says Secure Virtual Machine Mode - Enabled

Hi Bluenose 1940,
You need to make the Sandisk Curzer as first boot device in BIOS, you have to create a bootable disk with Media Creation tool, please read these tutorials for clarification, if you are in doubt, please ask,
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1...n-install.html
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/9...d.html#option2.
BTW, I am not Bluenose, sorry.
Regards.

Let's get the situation correct first. You have a system which came with Windows 8.1 pre-installed? You then upgraded that to Windows 10 and showed the Electronic activation in the Activation window?

If this is the case, you don't have to deal with Secure Boot, just leave it alone.

If you used the media creation to create the USB media, it should have set it up correctly. If you created the USB media yourself, you have to make it bootable and then copy over the contents of the .iso.

A blinking cursor at the upper left normally means you have booted into a non-working OS install. Exactly what options you have to boot the USB drive would depend on how your bios is set up and if the answer to the first question is yes, it is probably set to boot UEFI only, which is what you may want.

OK folks, I think that I am now heading in the right direction. I have downloaded an ISO to my USB memory stick and it is titled 'Windows' and it says that it is a disk image file and the size is 3,202,688kb.

Does all of that sound about right to you. Thanks again for the help.