I have a hard drive with an older windows 10 version and some other partitions. I want to totally reformat the drive and reinstall windows 10. The Device Manager will list only the partitions and not the complete drive. Do I have to format it from a dvd or another hard drive or can it be reformatted from the Media Creation Tool or ?
Hello Funkyecat, :)
If you like, booting from your Windows 10 installation media and doing a normal clean install will completely wipe the disk of all partitions before installing Windows 10 to it.
Clean Install Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials
I don't have the installation media. Maybe create recovery USB.?
This will be a problem.
You can reformat the disk but if you don't have installation media what are you going to do?
You can reset Windows without reinstalling but that will not reformat the disk - see here Reset Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials
If you reformat the disk you must have some installation to put on it or it will remain empty.
You could use Option One in the tutorial below to create an installation USB with MCT.
One issue is that when I perform a complete reinstall, the compotor setting in Bioe in RAID and I am unable set it to AHCI.
Switch the setting to AHCI and then boot from your install media, such as a flash drive. The Media Creation Tool will create a flash drive for you.
I was told that you have to format the HD. It cannot be done. I'll try to reinstall win 10, Initially it will not boot from a USB via MCT.
Double check using the tutorial below to see if it may help to boot from the USB created by MCT.
No, you don't have to format the HD. If you boot from USB it doesn't care what is on any of your hard drives and AHCI is a BIOS not a Windows setting.
Assuming you can boot from your USB you can delete all partitions at that point (either from Windows Installer or any other bootable USB).
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