Windows 10: Professional cleaning: what's involved?

You won’t need that recovery partition. It’s a much cleaner, snappier install using the install media that you created as the finished product won’t have all the garbage installed by the OEM.

Did iyou see how big the small disk was by chance?

When you get done scrubbing the disks and begin the new installation, allow it to connect to the net so it can download updates and drivers as it installs.

 

That's good news! I thought perhaps I had messed things up by scrubbing the recovery partition.

I did not notice the size of the recovery partition but I think it's a 1 TB drive and the main partition was 929 GB so the recovery partition should be something like 50 or 60 GB. I sure wish they'd coded diskpart to show you progress in some way but I've got my brother monitoring the command prompt to tell me when it's done. That let's me be more productive.

I'll reconnect his ethernet cable once the two partitions are erased. I'm already looking forward to this problem finally being resolved....

Thanks again for your help so far but don't go away. I may have an additional question or two as I work through the rest of the steps.

 

List disk command lists hard drives, not partitions. The smaller one should be your USB Flash drive. Disk 0 at 929 GB should be your main hard drive.

 

I know that. I was silently wondering if he's wiping his install media by mistake. Will diskpart let you do that?

 

Diskpart finished cleaning Disk 1 without errors. I selected Disk 0 and started cleaning that one half an hour ago. If I have to create a fresh copy of the install media, I will find the tutorial again and do so. That should solve the problem if I have inadvertently erased the install media, right?

 

I really don't know, I've never tried. But you are asking it to erase itself. I'm not sure if that's possible The only way I can think of is if it is running in ram. Maybe, it could do it that way.

 

The second disk cleaning is done now, much sooner than I expected. The "list disk" command now says there is just one disk, Disk 0, now. The status is Online and the size is 931 GB; free is also 931 GB.

It looks like I did indeed wipe the flash drive; when I try to read it in my laptop, it tells me it needs to be formatted. I'm going to re-create the installation media, reconnect the ethernet, and run the install.

Maybe I'll have this desktop back to fully-working condition before I go to bed tonight!

 

Another hitch!

I'm trying to recreate the installation media on the same flash drive it was on before I wiped it but my laptop doesn't see the flash drive. I can't format it either; I fill in the options (FAT32) and uncheck Quick Format, it starts the format, then immediately stops and says it can't proceed. The format doesn't see the capacity of the flash drive so I'm guessing that's the issue? Anyway, I could use a different flash drive but I need to know how to get *this* one reformatted because it belongs to a friend and I have to give it back to her in a few weeks. So I might as well reformat *this* flash drive and then use it to install Win 10 on my brother's desktop, then simply erase the files from the flash drive in the normal way.

So how do I reformat the flash drive so Windows can use it again?

 

Have you tried the quick format? That's usually quicker and faster. It's also all you really need anyway. Flash drives are not the most durable drives though.

 

When I put the blank flash drive in the laptop, it says "Please insert a disk into USB Drive (E*Smile". The only button I've got on the dialog is cancel. The LED on the flash drive blinks constantly. I have a constant hourglass in File Explorer.

Have I actually trashed this flash drive so that it can't be reformatted and needs to be replaced?

 

It sort of sounds like it to me. However, I doubt you did it. It was just time. You may want to try it again in a day or so. It may work. I had one the computer wouldn't recognize this week. A couple of days later, it worked just fine. I have no clue why.

 

That flash drive has worked perfectly for months and now it won't even format. I think I destroyed it with diskpart.... I've tried it in several computers and it can't be read in any of them. I'll try again in a few days and see if it magically starts working but I'm not holding my breath.

On the positive side, I've reinstalled Windows on my brother's computer and it's updated it to version 1709. I don't see any obvious problems and the install went *much* faster than I've ever seen a Windows install go before; it was so fast that I thought something was wrong. But it looks okay. There's only one odd thing which suggests the erase did not clear *everything* away. His background picture for his desktop, which is a photograph he took himself, is back. Shouldn't he have lost that during the erasure of the hard drive? Or does Microsoft magically save it to the cloud somewhere, filed under his MAC address or something of that kind? I don't know whether to be concerned....

 

If he uses a Microsoft account and Sync Settings is turned on, that's what it does.

 

It just needs a partition created on it, then you can format it. You can do that with Diskpart or (probably safer, with your track record *Smile) Disk Management.

Run Disk Management and you'll see the USB drive listed as 'unallocated'. Right-click on the unallocated space and select 'New Simple Volume' to create and format a new partition.

 

Does that also account for his Edge bookmarks still being there? I was quite surprised when he told me that the bookmarks hadn't been lost. It's a good surprise, as long as doesn't undermine our belief that the hard drive was erased.

For what it's worth, I used File Explorer to look at the top level folders in Windows and all of them are dated September 29, 2017 or today. That implies that there are no files lingering from previously; I'm guessing that Sept 29 was when the Creators Update was finalized....