Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade  

Brink said:

Hello monumental,
Both a reset and clean install will wipe everything and give you a new installation of Windows 10. A reset would be the easiest option to use.
Reset Windows 10 | Tutorials

Thanks, Brink. In the clean install guide it says to Temporarily disconnect all non OS hard drives until Windows installation has finished. Is that not necessary with a reset?

Also, is there an easy way to move the Desktop/Photos/Documents folders to a different drive or do they all have to be moved individually for each User? Want to have those files on another drive, but don't want it part of a system image.

Brink said:

Correct. No need to do that with a reset.
Those folders would indeed need to be moved individually per user.

Ok, and if on current install I used Kari's method and moved the User folder in audit mode, will the reset move it back to OS drive or keep it on the separate drive?

Hi - I have downloaded the iso file, mounted it, run Setup.exe, but I am either getting a rather cryptic message that Windows is not installed in the correct location (it is installed in C:\Windows - I'm sure that there are ways of installing somewhere else but I shudder to think what those methods might involve), or, having got past that (or rather, sometimes that just doesn't happen) when I get to the what to keep page, I can only select Nothing. Can you tell me the setup.exe switches to force the process to perform the upgrade. I thought I had found them but CMD cannot parse, recognise, or execute them. Thanks!

Hmm - the plot sickens... Apparently, the switches I have been using (Setup.exe /auto upgrade) are correct. So... why the error messages and failure to comply...?

Hi Dalchina, thanks for getting back to me so quickly. No, I never had any need to modify any such registry entries, which is why I find it very odd that I should be getting this error message. The story is this- I originally installed Windows 10 on an 8-core Xeon on an Asus Sabretooth motherboard. This system eventually became very sluggish and unresponsive, and so I swapped out the board for a Gigabyte running an i7. I knew I would be in for some problems, but I have to say I have always found Win10 to cope with this kind of thing much better than any other version of Windows. All went surprisingly well, to the point that Device Manager showed everything unflagged, SFC reported no problems, Prime95 ran (overnight) etc and all seemed to be OK. However, I am now getting random crashes. Sometimes the system will run for a couple of days with no problems, or I'll just turn it on and it goes pop. The CPU fan runs up very high prior to a crash, even after replacing it with a much better model which could point to a hardware problem but this board and chip ran perfectly for years, even with the previous, much less powerful, cpu cooler in place. I anticipated problems swapping the board out from under Windows, but, as I say, things went - relatively - smoothly at first. Now I just think it makes sense to refresh Windows but I don't want to lose all the installed programs if I can help it. Also, there was nothing exotic about the installation on the Xeon/Asus combo.