My thanks to Word Man and NavyLCDR for your suggestions.
I will 'bite the bullet' and do a clean install as suggested, but can't spare the time until next weekend - will let you know the outcome. In the meantime, just one final question if I image the entire disk to external media using Macrium Reflect - does this simply image the C: and D: drives or does it also include the other hidden partitions?
It will include all the partitions on the hard drive. I would recommend you make a bootable DVD/USB flash drive of Kyhi's recovery drive from this forum. It contains Macrium Reflect Free and other utilities that will be very useful should you run into problems:
Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk - Windows 10 Forums
Also, read the first post linked above - if you have a Windows 10 install USB - you can copy over the boot.wim file and make yourself a very useful combined recovery and installation drive.
Apologies for what are probably stupid questions, but if I make an image of the entire disk, when I copy this back to the hard disk won't it simply recreate all the partitions and associated data I currently want to clean up?
One other issue I have that caused me grief when I did a clean install of Win 10 on my other desktop is that Windows required the original OEM Windows licence number to register Windows 10. However, unlike my other desktop and laptop where this information is on a sticker, there is nothing on the Lenovo PC. How can I find the original Licence number?
You wouldn't restore the entire disk, ONLY your C: partition and, after making room for it on the disk, your D: partition. You image entire disk, do clean install, and then only selectively restore the old C: and D:. All the other partitions are left behind in the backup because those have been replaced during the Win10 clean install.
I'm afraid I fell at the first fence: tried making an image of my HDD to my NAS with Macrium Reflect, but the program does not recognize my NAS shares. I set up Network Logon under the tools button for \\MyNAS\Public, with correct user name and password, but when I try to select the network drive where the image will be be stored, I get the error message: Windows cannot access \\MyNAS - with the error code 0x80070035. Furthermore, none of the mapped shares show up as drives when I try to select a folder. Windows automatically logs onto the NAS without any problems and other software that use the NAS also logon without a problem. So what is causing Reflect to fail to recognize the NAS? Any thoughts on what is causing the problem and solutions would be appreciated. Also, Reflect shows that much of the hidden partitions is free space.
This version Technicians license explained - Macrium Software
might be able to do that but not free.
Don't try to access the NAS directly. Try mapping a drive letter first and then access that drive letter. This trick works with older software that has difficulty accessing network drives.
I was advised in one of the posts to my HDD issues to use Macrium Reflect free v6 - which is what I installed for home use. I can't see anything in the options supported by this version that says that it does not support NAS drives (Macrium Reflect Free
) and I don't get any mssage from the software saying tha this functionality is no supported by the free version, but perhaps I miss understood this. As I said in my post this morning, my shares are mapped to drive letters, but these are not listed in the folder options either.
I really appreciate the support given to try and resolve my HDD issues, but I am struggling: I have a USB boot disk for my current Win10 version 10240, but when I do a search of for BOOT.WIM the file is not present. I also don't understand the instructions for creating Kyhi's bootable disk from his post or how to copy the BOOT.WIM file from this to my Win10 bootable disk. I presume that to create the dual boot disk I would also need to copy Kyhi's bootable disk files onto the USB drive. Apologies again for asking more questions
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