Windows 10: Advice for a Windows 10 clean install

Hello Everyone,

I would like to do a clean install on my HP dv6 laptop with a primary 128 GB Crucial M4 SSD with a secondary 1 TB Toshiba HDD 5400rpm (installed in the DVD bay) and was hoping to get some advice on best way to perform a clean install of Windows 10 while creating new volumes, etc.

I am not a power user, but would like to reserve an area to install a second OS in the future. I do have one FAT32 partition on the SSD reserved for HP_Tools which I would like to shrink if possible, because it is allocated 100 MB even though it only uses 20 MB.

I have already upgraded from Windows 8, and performed one clean install via USB.

Some thoughts and questions:

- I would like to keep my working files separate from the OS
- Does an OS need to be installed on a Primary Volume?
- Can the HDD have Primary Volumes?
- Is the 4 Primary Volume limitation still in place?
- Supposedly I have UEFI support ..... does that eliminate the Primary Volume limitation?

Basically I would like to end up with a reliable and fast system that can be easily recovered. And in the future I may play around with Android emulators, etc.

I am not a complete newbie, but it has been some time since I have played around with these things, so perhaps it is better to treat me so.

I have backed up both drives so, no problem deleting everything. I imagine I must keep the HP_Tools partition because I think they keep UEFI info there too, but I am not sure.

Thanks in advance!

:)

 

Fraud

The general advice is to clean install Windows 10 and then change your passwords.

 

Windows 10 product key for a clean install

Hi there,

I tried to take advantage of the free update from win 8.1 however my tablet freezes after the upgrade, and if I turn it off and on again it rolls back to win 8.1 and stated some sort of error. As a result I decide to clean install win 10. I used the tool
to create the installation usb stick for windows 10 home Chinese language version as the version of my win 8.1 is win 8.1 with bing (Chinese). However, now even though there is no error any more and the system works like a charm, I can not get activated and
the system prompts the product key is invalid ( I skipped all the requests to input product key during the installation process so no product key has been entered by me). Now what should I do to get it activated again?

 

Here's a nice tutorial from Brink that should help out:
Windows 10 - Clean Install - Windows 10 Forums

 

So you want to install Windows 10 or Upgrade it from Windows 8. You can keep the OS and important programs on your SSD and then place the remaining ones on the Hard Drive along with your Pictures, Documents, Videos, Downloads and so forth. Yes it has to be primary and the HD can have primary partitions. I do not believe that there is a limit on the number of Primary Partitions. I used to have 4 HD's install with numerous partitions. Welcome to the Forum and I hope that I have helped you.

 

hate the fact, that theres no way to do clean install on a computer - you need to upgrade first old windows before you can do clean install. HATE IT! had ubuntu only on my 4th computer and now i installed windows 10 there. great. :E

 

Thank you Bunny,

I have seen the tutorial, which is very well done, but I do not think it addresses my specific question, which I may have not made clear. I want to know how I should best partition my drives to use Windows 10 across my two storage devices.

I am limited to 128 GB on the faster SSD. I moved the slow 1 TB HDD to the slot that held the DVD to have a second drive.

 

Welcome to the Ten Forums! spmcd The first place I will point you to right away is the guide intended for seeing a clean install of 10 you will want to pay close attention to! You can look that over at: How to Clean Install Windows 10

Your mention of having a second hard drive installed may be a factor in seeing this done if the second 5400rmp HD for example was added in for storage since the 10 installer will likely place boot files at the root of that drive if you are planning to see 10 go onto the ssd?! Any Non OS drives have to be unplugged. I just went through performing an upgrade with two storage drives plugged in and wondering why none of the attempts to upgrade a second install of 7 first cloned to a second OS drive for a 10/7 dual boot kept failing. Even when replacing the clone of 7 with a full clean install problems persisted!

The guide there has also been updated since I posted a few times there indicating some potential problems that came up and how to avoid those as well as the answers for what options you have when going to upgrade or see a clean install. If you have already downloaded and upgraded your laptop or some other system then you should be set to go for a clean install without the worry about getting a product key or seeing a clean install on any system other then the one that saw the upgrade take place where you can also download 10 in ISO image form in order to create a USB Installation Key or burn an installation dvd.

If you are planning to dual boot which it doesn't sound like with only a 128gb OS drive in you could easily split the second larger drive up into two partitions to have the second for storage and backup as well as keeping a system image for the 10 host drive since it seems the ssd would be where 10 goes. But if you haven't already tended to an upgrade of 10 over a previous version you could run into activation problems later even while those servers are quite busy at this time anyways!

The guide there will take you things step by step as it was well written! When and if using the Media Creation tool the first thing you come to is the choice for 10 Home, 10 Home N, 10 Pro, and 10 Home N. The N editions replace the 7 N or 8 N types. If you are or were running a Home edition and haven't upgraded over that you will need to first see a clean install to upgrade it with 10 and then once it is activated perform the clean install even wipe the drive clean for a totally frest start of everything.

As for the idea of dual booting note that the free for home use utility many of us used for dual boots with Windows 7 as well as for 8 will work in seeing the BCD store for 10 edited as well! The old boot.ini file went out with XP! *Biggrin So you can install the second OS later if a previous version of Windows that is by first unplugging the drive 10 is going onto now and once the older version is on replug the 10 host drive back in and add a new boot entry in for the second Windows.

Now for other then Windows OSs you would then need the other guy's boot loader information and tool for this . I just got done finally seeing 10 working well after the second upgrade over the first following two clean installs of 7 when previous failed attempts left boot files all over from not having unplugged the two storage drives the first few times around. The 7 host will soon need to be wiped clean while presently I work on getting things running on the latest version before I can tend to that while I already have the boot entry for 7 working well and won't need to edit the 10 BCD again. I simply unplug that as well as a 3rd storage drive now replacing the first two when seeing 7 go back on likely no longer the host OS with 10 being the new kid on the block! *Biggrin

 

Thank you Gary,

I have already done the upgrade and then a clean install from the USB. I did the upgrade with the SDD and HDD in place. When I did the clean install the first time, I ran into some problems because I formatted the system partition and ended up removing the HDD so I could install the DVD drive and do a system recovery. So, my first clean install, I did with just the SSD. Now I have





As you can see the HDD is currently dynamic and I would like to know the best way to set all this up. *Smile

 

Thank you Night Hawk,

I have read the very nice tutorial (thank you Shawn!) but I get confused by some of the options and also am not sure how it applies across two drives.

One thing I did not understand was when he gets into the UEFI install and the 4 partitions created. These partitions were not created on my SDD and I am not sure if I can delete my HP_Tools FAT32 Volume or not. Or if I can move it somehow to the HDD.

You are right on the money in thinking that I would like to have a System Image on the HDD, as well as my files. I was thinking that different Volumes would be prudent for that as well.

You are right on the money in thinking that I would like to keep a system image on the HDD, as well as the bulk of my files.

Basically, I would like to come up with how many volumes I need, with what sizes, formats, cluster sizes, etc.

My thought is something like this:

DISK0 SSD 128GB
C: System Volume - NTFS 50GB ***Windows 10***
D: Files SSD - NTFS 70GB ***Files for faster access*** (Do not know if this is necessary)
E: HP_Tools - FAT32 50MB ***HP specific Tools*** (I do not know if I need this, but there is something with UEFI)

DISK 1 HDD 1TB
F: Files HDD- NTFS 900GB ***Normal file usage*** (Maybe it is better to split into more than one partition)
G: SysImage - NTFS 100GB ***Windows 10 System image backups***

I also have a NAS with mirrored 2TB drives where I can make backups.

The second drive, HDD, is currently dynamic and I do not know if it should be basic ... nor how to change it.

I do not know if all the Volumes should be Primary and how to set them so.

I am very open to advice. *Smile

 

With a desktop build with larger OS drives of course you can see how the partitioning is layed excluding the OEM recovery and HP tools parts you see there.





You will notice while 10 on Disk 0 an 7 is on Disk 1 with a 3rd drive intended for storage and backup you don't see one of the other two included since the problematic drive of those two is now seeing files backed up from that before being tossed as well as being in an external usb enclosure with an on/off switch. Even with the OS drives also being 1tb in size as well as the storage drives I still manage to keep only the essential partitioning scheme of a single primary on each drive while you have the ssd split up quite a bit! in addition to the HP tools you would otherwise keep in the preinstalled Windows even following the upgrade is to remain.

If you are fully intent on wiping the upgraded form of 10 off of the ssd then the OEM tools could be backed up to the larger 5400rpm drive at the back end of that drive which also appears to have a tiny 100mb partition there you could keep them on while nuking the "C" drive intended for 10 clean due to the small size since the miniumum 60gb can prove to be rather small once you start adding on all the programs you have now or would put on later! 128gb of drive space can go real fast and why some still can't figure out why I wanted 1gb OS drives instead of tiny ssds! Now that 1tb size ssds are available however?

 

We missed each other's post there for sure! things like the UEFI and disabling Secure Boot are bios related for various newer boards people put into custom builds and not necessarily anything you would worry about with an OEM laptop in particular since you already have support for booting directly from a usb flash drive. A number of older boards lacked the support for this.

Those are instances where sometimes a firmware update is needed for the mother board and has nothing to do with the OS. Following the lack of Fat seen with Vista and MS seeing Fat support returned with 7 which digital cameras, cell and smart phones, SD memory cards as additional storage for those, and flash drives typically bought with a Fat volume no less MS got a wake up call there! Ready Boost became a common household term when Vista arrived with support for Fat having been removed! GOOBER!

As far as removing the Fat 32 factory anything no problem! Besides the built in Disk Part tool you can use at the command prompt while booting live from let's an older version's dvd to see this tended to while the OS isn't running one quick command will take care of that one fast! You can even zero out the drive fast and easy and start over fresh with a brand new primary and call it a day for the HP tools.

 

Hi Night Hawk,

Yes you are correct that a larger SSD would be handy, but I have decided not to upgrade it yet, because I will probably upgrade the whole system within a year and sure a larger SSD would be included.

Is your suggestion that I format the SSD and use the whole space for Windows 10? I did on my first clean install and that is where I ended up running into problems (of course that was done before reading the tutorial) in that it would not let me install and I had to go back to the HP Windows 7 recover DVDs.

I have no idea if I can just blow away the HP_Tools or if it is needed by my machine. I have pretty much given up on HP after they did not even create Windows 8 drivers for a laptop which I bought just before Windows 8 started shipping on new machines.

I am also not clear on what type of Volumes would be advisable to create, Primary or Simple and if I can change my HDD from Dynamic.

 

The OS would always be a primary type! In most cases a second backup/storage type is also a primaty by default when seeing it created. As for saving the 100mb Fat volume you actually don't anything to worry about since 100mb is actually tiny in comparison to 100+gb! The need for the recovery partition on the recovery partition even won't see any need since that has become a second drive on the laptop there and takes up space that could be turned a larger storage/backup partition for system image backups. When using the backup included in Windows can be larger then those made by a 3rd ware like Acronis True Image for example where the second partition would be made up rather then one large partition to cover storage and backup fi and when you saw a second OS like 7 go onto the larger 1tb drive. 200-300 for 7 should be plenty where the remaining drive space is then allocated for backing things up.

A Windows made image can run upto 300gb depending on how much is on the OS drive itself. With a much smaller 128gb ssd however you might see two or three image backups to come close to that as well as whatever files you stash away there. The external drives you have however do provide a much more long term plan for storage and backup purposes while having a system image or two on the larger drive allows you to simply boot with a live disk or flash drive even to restore the image.

Speaking of system images I forgot to mention I had made up two for an HP laptop I bought as a gift for someone running the Home edition one relabeled to "WindowsBackup_Factory" when that was first bought before really anyone putting anything on it and later one once everything was set to go for the person who got the 2012 birthday gift! The first image came in at 30gb even almost while the second was 36.6gb approx. showing how you could end up having multiple image backups and would make a second primary not extended on the second drive if planning to see 7 or 8 put there.

 

I haven't closely examined this thread, but:

Dynamic partitions are almost always a bad idea. They are totally unnecessary on a typical home PC. They have some value in a corporate environment.

Disks initialized as MBR are limited to 4 primary partitions.

Disks initialized as GPT are NOT limited to 4 partitions.

Windows 10 supports GPT and you can change from MBR to GPT, but I think that would require you to delete all partitions from the drive and start from a bare disk.

If I were you, I'd get rid of the dynamic partitions. You'd have to back up whatever is on those partitions. There are certain applications that say they can convert dynamic to basic with no risk to your data, but I wouldn't trust that my data wouldn't be at risk.

I would not put only SOME of my data files on an SSD. I'd put all of them on it or none of them on it. I see you are thinking about the faster access speed advantage of the SSD and so want to put some data files on the SSD in a separate partition.

I wouldn't do that. The faster access speed advantage would be outweighed by the disadvantages. Having data files on 2 distinct disks will complicate your backup strategy. And disk space on SSDs is too valuable---they are relatively small compared to HDDs and you will end up wasting some space due to the fact that you've broken an already small disk up into even smaller partitions. I'd try to have a minimum number of partitions on the SSD and use all possible space for Windows and as many applications as will fit, leaving some room for growth. Put all data on some other disk--presumably HDD.

In 3 years, maybe SSDs are so large and so cheap that it might be sensible to partition them. We're not there yet. If you absolutely insist on some data files on an SSD, I'd get another SSD for data alone, although personally I'd think that a waste of money in the typical situation. Maybe you've got a highly unusual situation, I dunno.