Clean Install Windows 10  

Kol12 said:

Hi Brink,

I've reinstalled Win 10 2004 and I could boot the flash drive with Win 10 installation media and secure boot enabled on my machine. I guess this will dependent on your machine/BIOS. I don't know if there is actually any security benefit to installing Windows with secure boot enabled.

Since Secure Boot is designed primarily to ward off someone gaining access to your system via a bootable thumb or CD/DVD, it can be safely left disabled, unless your are expecting a drive-by thumb hacker attack. If these are at-home systems they are safe, if these are laptops that are prone to being left on an office desk, or other public area, definitely enable it.

This is a great guide that helped me. I had one problem, and a suggestion.

In step 13 (Legacy BIOS/MBR), in the yellow box it says "If the hard drive or partition that you have selected is shown as unallocated, then you can just click/tap on the Next button ..." however doing this led me to a black screen with blinking cursor after the installer appeared to have finished copying the files and rebooted after the next step. Booting from a Win PE utility USB showed that no partitions had been created on the target SSD.
What I did to get around this:
At Step 13, I deleted any existing partitions on the target drive, then clicked in the unallocated space, then clicked New (left it at the max size) and Apply. It created two partitions: the System partition and a large blank partition which I clicked to install Windows on. Files copied, rebooted, and I was able to continue.

This is on a 2012 Dell XPS 15 laptop that hasn't had a BIOS update since 2013, so this step probably isn't needed on most systems, but if you get stuck on the black screen blinking cursor, it's an easy thing to try.

The only other solutions I found involved using the command prompt to access Diskpart and manage the partition manually, but that was difficult and I also didn't get the system reserved partition, which kept me looking for a better answer.

EDIT: The other thing I did was physically remove the second HDD I had installed in the old Blu-ray drive bay (as noted at the beginning of the guide). It's possible this was causing the problem, too.

Thank you @FunkyBrewster.

The other options in step 13 is mostly for when you are dual booting or wanted to install Windows 10 on a partition without wiping the the whole disk until unallocated.

I agree, it's best to install on an unallocated disk for best results, and I have added a bolded red note in step 13 to help make that more clear to help others avoid what you experienced.

Suggestion:



Under Step 23, could you add something about "If you don't want a Microsoft account, goto to Step 24 to setup a local account."

Otherwise there are a lot of lines of information before you get to Ste 24 and realize you can still setup a local account.

Ztruker said:

Suggestion:

Under Step 23, could you add something about "If you don't want a Microsoft account, goto to Step 24 to setup a local account."

Otherwise there are a lot of lines of information before you get to Ste 24 and realize you can still setup a local account.

Hey Rich,

That's what step 22 is for.

Matthew Wai said:

In step 20, if no Internet connection is available, one may click on "I don't have internet" in the bottom left-hand corner as shown below:

Then, the following screen will appear. Click on "Continue with limited setup" to set up a local account.

The above photos were taken when I installed version 1903.

Thank you Matthew. Tutorial updated to include this under step 20.

Farvatten said:

Setting up a Local Account with a clean install of 20H2 on a Home Platform now rejects my bogus 111-111-1111 Phone Number and alerts me with a red warning 'Not a valid phone number', asking instead for either another number, or an email account, and the 'offline account' option no long appears at the bottom left.

Disconnecting the internet however at this point moves me immediately to the 'Who's going to use this computer' Local account setup thankfully.

Hello Farvatten,

I've found that you need to use 1234567890 as the bogus phone number like at step 24 for it to work.