I have a laptop running win 10 with 4 partions on All i need is to clear the lot and reinstall win 10 Is there a simple way
many thanks
Hi,
- Save your data to an external drive
- As you say your drive has 4 partitions it's probably set as UEFI-GPT.
- Do a clean install.
- I suggest you build the USB Win 10 22h2 installation drive using MCT
- Windows can be installed in two ways: Legacy-MBR or UEFI-GPT
To install as Legacy-MBR you must boot the installation drive as Legacy
To install as UEFI-GPT you must boot the installation drive as UEFI.
As you have a UEFI BIOS, you should install as UEFI-GPT
Detach any other drives (SATA or Power cable) from the MB.
During POST, press F12(?) to launch the boot menu. You will see two options for the USB drive. USB UEFI (Name) and USB (Name). Select USB UEFI (Name) if you want to install as UEFI-GPT or select USB (name) if you want to install as Legacy-MBR.
Go to install and delete ALL partitions on the main drive till you have one and only one unallocated space and then proceed.
If you don't want to use MS account, don't enable updates or connect to the internet during installation.
This way is the desperation method. I used it when my surface (uefi) declined to let me change the settings that would make a wipe followed by an install or recovery possible.
I had a friend make me three usb bootables.
* win10 install
* win 10 pro with surface recovery
* debian live
These went onto kangeru 32G usb drives with read-only switch. After making the bootables, switch to read-only so that an infected (if that's your problem) pc cant add its own goodies to the drives in case you need a do-over, and you might*
First, do the normal things to get ready. Back up what you can't lose.
Then boot the debian live. Select starting up in graphics mode.
Find the app Disks and open it. You'll see the familiar graphic disk layout with its various partitions. Below that graph are a few selections. Don't do what I first did. Don't select the gear thing. That works on a partition basis. Go to the upper right where the three dots are and click that. There you will find options on a disk-basis. Pick format.
You'll see a screen ask two questions: wipe (yes) and i forget the second one, but it'll be obvious.
Then go.
It'll take about 45 minutes.
*But you aren't done after that. Do it again. And then again. I found this out the hard way. Dont let anyone bullshit you that it should zero with one pass. I should get free ice cream every day. But, I don't.
Three tries resulted in no fragments in any recovery files. One did not, and windows RT or whatever it is was able to reconstruct from ghat little bit of gibberish an entire recovery section. If you were hacked, you do not want this at all. Three wipes, no fragments.
I just did this again with a 512 GB HD rather than that 128 GB drive, and I still got a fragment. I'm going to see where it goes.
Now, once you have wiped the drive for a couple hours, you can use either the win10 install or the recovery disks.
You can do either without ever going online and still have a win10 installation, but you probably do want to go online. Still, you can get updates and never have a microsoft account if that's what you want.
I did all this in the presence of an it-meister friend, resulting in several screaming fights. Yes, he's Cisco certified, so he knows the more or less normal stuff. Once a pc is hacked, it's by definition f'ed up. Meaning that it won't listen to you the same way as it did before. We departed to my ways, since I'm a Ph.D in being hacked.
I'm back in business now.
If you don't have an apparently intractable problem, you should leave this method to last. Linux apparently marches to its own drummer and will wipe what you tell it to, whether or not that's good for you.
You will see the option to delete partitions etc around step 13/14 of the above tutorial.
It's shown in a screenshot.
I had a problem where the normal clean-install process apparently did not clean out all bits of the previous (bad) install. As a result, I could not do a clean install.
I used the windows install option that eventually got me to a cmd prompt windows. Then I ran diskpart and cleaned out the selected disk. Then I did a reboot and was able to do a clean Win 10 install after that.
0. Remember Windows 10 have an extra partition called system reserve. It also makes 500MB part when you make a restore point. There are also smaller invisible partitions used for startup files. The system reserve ( In my system is labeled I:/ ) is literally the boot record for the entire operating system and can not load without it.
1. Lets say you do not have anything important on the non operating system partitions. You go to
Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage
A. In Storage you should see the active partitions. Sometimes you might see ones made by DELL or HP, which are safe to delete. Delete what is not system reserved.
B. If there are System Recovery partisans you could eliminate those as well, but they are only 500MB and maybe you want to leave those alone for now. However if you know there are no problems they are safe to delete via the system recovery console. ( wherever that is located ???? ).
C. Then you want to extend your partition of your Operating system drive. On Windows you are not allowed to go past 2TB
if your using MBR. You have 3rd party tools that can format "Virtual" MBR on the rest of the drive to access. GPT you can. Again this is only the primary operating system. It is a bit of an operation to install Windows 10 on a +2TB part. via MBR.
You can attempt to extend via the Computer management -> Storage options, this will take your current partition and allow you to go to the mac within the windows environment. MBR is usually 2TB and GPT ???? You can use 3rd party tools like
Ease US Partition manger or any other 3rd party tool. to extend but that is up to you.
...................
That is probably less then ten clicks all together and some sliders.
Quote
