Installation :: Completely Format Over Disk Partition Before Doing A New Install On New Drive
Feb 23, 2016
I have to do an install of Windows 10. It was only a few days ago I just installed to a hdd. The hdd is clearly screwed at a certain point. I copied a load of stuff to it and it is now totally locked into doing something. Whatever it is trying to figure out - I have seen it do it before. Just to cut a long story short - I am about to install win10 to a new drive. ssd incidentally.
do I need to completely format over that disk partition with win 10 on it before doing a new install on the new drive? What I am asking is whether it will refuse to license it if it detects another win10 on the system. Just that portion of the disk is screwed but I have stuff on different parts of that disk that are fine... They can stay. I will simply consider that partition out of bounds from now on.
I've been considering shrinking my one disk (disk 0) to create another volume, a data partition, but I'm still not clear what happens in the event that I want to refresh, reset or clean install Windows 10 in the future. Would the data partition remain or, as I thought I read, Windows will format the entire disk?
Stupid question probably, however I cannot find an answer online and I'm not the most tech savvy.
I bought a HP laptop around Christmas last year. The laptop came with a recovery partition, which I still to date haven't got around to getting a 32gb drive to back it up to.
I stupidly left W10 installing this morning when my upgrade was offered, but am worried now that the partition with my recovery may be deleted and I may no longer be able to get that onto a drive in case I ever need to re-install the laptop.
I've already upgraded to Windows 10 on my desktop PC, and there were no issues with the upgrade. However, I work from home and my work has informed me that they won't accept Windows 10, they will only accept 7 or 8.1 as their operating system (they also only accept Internet Explorer for browsing, etc.). So I can either downgrade, which I really don't want to do, buy a second PC, which I can't afford to do, or (I'm hoping) create a new partition and run Windows 7 from that.
So my question is, is it possible to create a new partition for Windows 7 while running Windows 10 on my main partition? Will I have to downgrade and install Windows 10 later? Or can I do it from Windows 10 already?
I have successfully upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 (and solved the initial network connection problems).
However my OS has a lot of crud from the pre-upgrade state and I would like to do a clean install of Windows 10, without losing any old data files. I've read online guides on doing clean installs of Windows 10, but it is not clear whether you can only install into partitions that already have a valid Windows OS installed.
My computer has two identical hard disks, one of which is (or can be made) blank so what I would like to do is keep one with the 'cruddy' version of Windows 10 - at least until I have copied over all the files I want to keep and made sure I've installed all the software I want on the new 'clean install' Windows 10.
So, are there people out there who have done this? Are there things I should look out for?
Upgraded to windows 10 pro via the media creation tool...its activated and going pretty well..so now i want to format my hard drive and clean install it...how can i do this safely? and will it be deactivated if i do a format?
I have a configuration where win 10 is installed on SSD but the Users folder is on a dynamic disk on HDD and the linking is made by a hard junction link from C: to D. I have removed paging on D as well as protection. Hence, I am able to remove all volumes of the dynamic disk and convert it back to a basic disk and format it.The problem is that I would like to keep all my installed programs (and settings, preferably). I have copied the Users directory to an external disk and copied them back to D after conversion. This seems to lead to a nonfunctional situation where I cannot even add a new user and most programs (even not all windows tools) do not work.What would be the best approach to avoid reinstalling the programs and to keep existing users?
I Bought an HP Pavilion Slimline (s5310f) computer in 2010 with Windows 7 Factory installed OS. Than I upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate OS.
Installed Windows 10 Pro.
I deleted Windows/OLD.
What is in the Factory Image that shows up in MY PC files ? It is also listed in System Restore? Is it Windows 10 Pro or Windows 7 that originally came with purchase.
I read somewhere that Windows 10 does not have a Factory Restore only Recovery.
[URL] ...
Is it safe to format the Factory Restore drive D for other uses?
Trying a Windows install on a Server box with 4 HDD's installed. This server also allows boot from a Micro SD card. I've got a 64GB micro SD card loaded as well.
Fails when trying to create any partition on any of the HDD's. Works if I temporarily remove one HDD or take out the 64GB internal micro SD card.
I Get a message "Windows cannot create partition on selected Disk" - even when totally empty. It doesn't matter if GPT or MBR disks either.
Seems that if you want to install a non server version of Windows (i.e Windows 10 Pro for example) 4 HDD's is the limit (a micro SD card counts as an HDD).
If I install Esxi on the SD card then no prob creating Windows VM's without removing HDD's.
I think after w10 is installed you can add more HDD's.
I don't want to lose my Windows 7 so I have Windows 2000 Full, Vista upgrade, Windows 7 upgrade, Windows 8 upgrade, so I figure I somehow put in Windows 8 upgrade however I get a message saying "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style" I think I know why is because I had the BATA Windows 10 on this disk and I can't delete 2 of the partitions.
Asus laptop with 8.1 installed. One disk, 2 partitions. I've installed 10 a number of times, VM and dual boot on desktop.
Went to install 10, dual boot. When I got to picking the partition, said "Cannot be installed, selected disk is of the MBR partition type."
Installed my Aomei Partition Assistant and changed to Disk to GPT. Now when I go to select the disk, it says "Cannot be installed, selected disk is of the GPT partition type.
Last night I wiped out my ASUS T100 tablet to clean install TH2. But there is a 7GB Recovery partition from Windows 8.1 that I can't get rid off using Diskpart.
So I recently formatted my Windows 8.1 system and installed Windows 10. But it seems that the setup decided to set my System parition to a separate HDD (G: ) and put the bootmgr and all the boot files there, instead of using the left-over 350MB System Reserved partition on my primary SSD that Windows 8.1 had used. So of course now if I removed that disk, I wouldn't be able to boot anymore.
So what'll be the best way to move all of the boot files and system partition setting back to my old 350MB System Reserved partition? Will I need to disconnect all the other drives and do a repair install of Windows 10? Or can I manually move the files and partition settings over? The old partition is still marked as Active, so maybe I can just move all the Boot related files from G: to the 350MB partition and it'll just work? Maybe mark G: as INACTIVE too
Because of a problem with 10 a tech told me to revert to 10270. I backed up everything important to my D: drive first. I did a complete formatting of C:. Then upon installing 10270 onto C: I first blew away the partitions on D:, realizing what I had done just after hitting the keys.
I have run Easeus's free Partition Recovery software but it finds absolutely nothing, even in deep scan.
Is there another reliable method with which to attack the problem of restoring the partition tables for D:?
I upgraded my custom built desktop from Windows 8.1 Pro With Media Center (Originally Windows 7 Pro Retail), and I've noticed I now have an OEM (Reserved) partition on my drive. I'm just about to do a clean install, and would like to know if it's safe to delete or whether I have to leave it there?
I did a clean install on a new SSD that I had previously formatted and neglected to delete the partition ending up without a MSR partition. I've already installed lots of applications so starting over would not be something that I'd want to do. What are possible problems that I could be looking at going forward?
Wondering how Windows 10 deals with putting data on a separate partition or drive. Does it use the same general method as in Windows 7, where it re-maps (for example) "Documents" to a folder on a different letter drive path? So that C:Users{user}Documents becomes G:Users{user}Documents?
I'm hoping that it actually becomes more like *nix, using symbolic links to point to the right place (so C:Users{user}Documents points to the separate partition of drive). Personally, I find the Win7 method to be clunky and problematic in actual use.
I am building a new computer next weekend and have three drives and need partitioning strategy for 3 drives:
- Drive 1: New 256GB SSD m.2 pci-e SSD for Win10 and apps (autocad, sketchup, Adobe CC, rendering apps)
- Drive 2: Old 2010 Vertex SSD which is 90-120gb (can't recall) for scratch disk/win page file for Adobe and apps
- Drive 3: New HGST 7200rpm 4TB 3.5" HDD for files, pics, video and possible system image ( necessary on Win10?)
1) I plan to format all 3 drives as NTFS unless there is strong suggestion to do otherwise?
2) what is best partition strategy for Drive 1? How much GBs for partitions for Win vs Apps? Is 60GB adequate for win10 partition leaving just under 200 GB for apps?
3) I read on win website to create 3 partitions for sys in this order: utilities; sys; win recovery. Does default win setup do this automatically or must I specify how many partitions and in what order and in what size? I'm clueless on this.
4) Disk 2: how much risk am I taking by using 5 yr old SSD for scratch disk? The virtual memory is volatile anyway so am I just risking each current session? I plan to point page file, cache, scratch to this drive. If too risky, I presume that using boot SSD as scratch is better than using HDD #3?
5) Disk 3: does win10 still require that user do image of opsys for recovery (using acronis et al) and, if so, how many GBs do I partition on Disk 3 and if so does it matter if it is the first or last partition on this drive 3?
6) what win 10 should I get? At Fry's they have OEM and also USB flash drive?
Since I had trouble with the upgrade with Windows 10 running very slow i'd like to try a clean install, but i'm weary because I am afraid it will wipe my 8.1 main partition and not roll back. I'm using this as a guide, but need to make sure i'm doing this properly. How to install Windows 10 - clean install, dual boot or VM | Expert Reviews
I currently have one drive that contains a System Reserved partition (which includes the boot files). The status is System, Active, Primary Partition.I have another drive with the C: partition. The status is Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition.I've been told that if I remove the disk (it's a bit flaky) with the System Reserved partition, I won't be able to boot up. If this is true, is it possible to transfer that partition to another drive? If so, does it have to be at the start of the drive? Alternatively, can I make the C: partition include System status?
As IE11 was malfunctioning, and my GT610 driver doesn't seem to work properly in Win10 32 bit, I attempted to upgrade to Win 10 x64 on my machine (Dual core, 64 bit ready, 4GB ram), and whilst doing so I think I've deleted the C: boot partition. I had partitioned the C drive and put the data in F: drive partition before hand so I didn't lose all my data.
When rebooting, I got the message "bootmgr is missing", so tried to boot from a Win 10 32bit iso DVD. I can get the DVD to launch, and tried to go through a repair, but got the message that the drive/partition was locked. I can't repair it, or boot. I also tried fixing it using Minitool Partition Wizard, which shows the partition without a label and as "unformatted". wasn't sure whether I should format the partition or not.
what I can do, to unlock the drive (from command prompt?) and then reinstall or repair Win 10.
Can I keep the F: partition with the data on it whilst doing an install of the x64 bit windows, or will I have to reformat the whole disk because of the different architecture?
Get Important updates: cleared. Gets windows 10 ready but then it Checks requirements:
Windows does not prompt any choices,
We couldn't update the system partition Dialog crashes. Does not allow one to choose which partition
Gateway Nv59 64 bit Intel 430m Duo core Windows 7 Premium 500GB hdd 8GB Gskill ram 1333mhz
Take note here that I cannot merge any of the disks, they all result in error or System lock. I can't make the 35MB system disk larger, but Easeus, Windows disk formatter and some other major ones I've tried just say No. But the problem is windows 10 doesn't give me the choice to overwrite the C or H which is quite large enough.
Take note that i just used the SAME flash drive to boot/install windows 10 to a friends lower spec Intel i3 laptop with 1/2 as much ram from Win 7 BASIC. Don't tell me It's not powerful enough..
I originally made a USB key which booted fine, but could not install on any partition on two different PCs and 4 different drives. It gave the error message "We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one. For more information, see the Setup log files." Tried different hard drives/partitions even a completely blank drive.
Did the usual wipe all partitions (on the two drives that are blank). I re-ran the MediaCreationToolx64 to make an ISO and now it is installing correctly. Is there a US English location I can download somebody's image of their USB drive or just try the 2 hour download again?
AND is their an explantion other than something went wrong creating the USBKEY? It is a brand new key (it is 3.0 but the ports are 2.0).
When I go to repair Windows 10, I put in the install disk, it goes to the windows logo with the dots spinning around at the bottom then to a black screen. I left this for 1 hour and it did not progress. The disk also seems to have stopped spinning. The disk works in other computers.
