Best Wiping & Installing Win10 Method for HP Laptop

There are government rules and regulations for cleaning drivers before sale or disposal.
To fulfil the government regulations the computer manufacturer's may install tools in the BIOS.
HP sells a lot of computers to government agencies and typically has the tools in the BIOS.
Each computer needs to be checked to see if there are onboard tools.
A clean install can take care of common cleaning. However the government has higher standards of cleaning and depending on how important or confidential the files are there are other cleaning options.
One tool is for HD and another is for SSD.
Disk sanitizer
Secure erase
There are tools that are external:
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01631502

vgkfan83 said:

It will avoid warranty, BUT he could use HP's Recovery Disk Creator and create and burn the recovery to disks, that way if he has to send it in to HP for repair, he could use those disks and put the computer back to factory settings.

Thank you very much vgkfan83 for your help and assistance. If I did a fresh start or clean of the laptop can I use this recovery disk creator to get the original settings when I first received the laptop?

zbook said:

There are government rules and regulations for cleaning drivers before sale or disposal.
To fulfil the government regulations the computer manufacturer's may install tools in the BIOS.
HP sells a lot of computers to government agencies and typically has the tools in the BIOS.
Each computer needs to be checked to see if there are onboard tools.
A clean install can take care of common cleaning. However the government has higher standards of cleaning and depending on how important or confidential the files are there are other cleaning options.
One tool is for HD and another is for SSD.
Disk sanitizer
Secure erase
There are tools that are external:
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01631502

Thank you!

sn00ker said:

If you're talking about doing a clean installation and you haven't touched from the original set up, I don't see why you couldn't create those disks and do a full image back up, have both.

Thank you very much again sn00ker for your assistance. I am planning on doing a backup on it and/or making the recovery drive as soon as I get my USB Flash Drive.

Also, I am still deciding is it still worth doing a wipe of the drive and reinstalling Windows 10 for a fresh copy. If I decide to move forward with the clean install option then what I am thinking about doing is leaving the Recovery Drive Partition alone so I don't lose that and wipe the C Drive that is installed with and then reinstall windows on that C drive. How does that sound? The other methods will remove it.

Thank you again!

For recovery some options include:

Create Recovery Drive in Windows 10
Factory recovery - Create a Custom Recovery Partition
Macrium Software | Your Image is Everything
Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect

zbook said:

For recovery some options include:
Create Recovery Drive in Windows 10
Factory recovery - Create a Custom Recovery Partition
Macrium Software | Your Image is Everything
Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect

Thank you very much for the links. Helpful. Looking forward to backing the stuff up!

sn00ker said:

You could do a few things, so it seem, but in the end, the choice is yours. If you can create those recovery disks, and make a full back up image? I believe those disks if need be, would recreate your original set up as how it is now. I'm curious what type of hard drive do you have and how big? Also, do you have an external hard drive ? And your warranty how long is it for ?

Thank you again for your help. I should be making these disks sometime today or by week end. I should be getting my USB Flash Drive from Amazon today, but time might be a problem..

The PC that I am trying to do all this on is a Laptop by HP that I bought from Costco on Thursday of last week. The internal hard drive on the laptop is 1 TB 5400 rpm SATA. I do own some older external drives that are 1tb or 2tb I believe. In terms of warranty, I will have to dig deeper on that a little later, but I am going to be contacting HP to find out more info.

Here is a link for the Specs if you would like more info. Access Denied