Need Help With Windows Upgrade please

kstingel said:

I have Windows 10 Pro build 240 installed (and activated) currently, but I want to update to (at minimum) the November Update, currently my start menu is 'broken' because after upgrading from Win 7 I had 52+ shortcuts

I have a single (500GB) Hard disk which has been partitioned to create C & D drives ... my User Data and Post (Win) Install software are on D drive

If I do a clean install, will that wipe the entire Hard disk, or just the System (C) partition? I'm asking so I know what I need to backup .. (the whole drive, or just the C partition)

Additionally, will a clean install fix my Win 10 Start Menu?

You can delete all partitions, or just the OS one. I recommend imaging both partitions.

I'm not familiar with your start menu problem. 10240 was supposed to have a 512 entry limit, which was increased to 2048 in the 1511 (aka 10586) build.

apologies, it was supposed to read "512+" not 52+

have edited and fixed the typo

as an alternative, is it possible to (clean) install to an external drive from within my current Windows, then just swap out the drive and plug the newly installed Windows drive in?

I have limited Sata ports, else I would just drop the larger (non-partitioned) drive into box and do a clean install to it

Am I correct in assuming that a clean install would erase any folder junctions currently existing between C & D drives?
(at present, C:/Users is actually D:/Users, but I would like to reset Windows to defaults and retain the data from D if I can so I can selectively recover the stuff I need)

If I clean install, overwriting only C drive, and initializing/installing my needed Apps
then use a (reputable) third Party program to backup the freshly installed C-drive
and later obtain a larger SATA drive

will restoring (in preference to cloning) the backed up fresh C-drive to the new
SATA drive effectively give me back a Pristine Windows 10 Installation?