I'll look now for this thread. Thanks!

Yep, I upgraded first with no problem. Was running Win10 for two days before I decided to do a clean install.

By the way, how did you know my laptop was an MSI laptop? :-)

Good idea! One of them IS 450Mb. The other is 600Mb. I'll delete the 450Mb and see what happens. Heh, can't do much more damage. I'm also creating a USB boot for Win8.1, using the link you gave...

Yep, it's a new PC with 8.1 pre-loaded on it. I just noticed that there are two 'recovery' partitions on my hd now. One of them is for the Windows 10. The other, I bet, is for the 8.1. I wish I...

Nice! I'll try this and see what happens. Thanks a lot, mate!

Yeah, I wish that I knew someone with the disc to install from, or even an .iso, but I don't. No worries, though, I may figure this out yet. Thanks for your help!

I'd love to roll back, but it appears that Windows 10 install overwrote my recovery partition and replaced it with a Windows 10 recovery partition.

Thanks! I will try this and see what happens... if this latest install doesn't work.

I'm going to try and re-do the installation and see what happens. I'll just reboot from the USB drive and let it do it's thing all over again. We'll see what happens.

Yes, it was connected during installation.

Well, I had typed out a longer response, but it didn't post for some reason. Anyway, long story short, Windows 10 was activated before I did the clean install.

This is a brand new laptop. Only thing loaded on it was the Windows 8.1 OS. The "Get Windows 10" app said that I qualified for a free upgrade to Windows 10. After reading an article on how to do a...