Windows 10: Which partition can I delete during clean installation of Windows 10?

While doing a clean install of windows 10, I get list of partition on my hard drive. I am too much confused as to which one should I delete to get a clean install of windows 10 and it gets activated automatically. Here is a screenshot of my disk management.

:)

 

The Efi system partition deleting during clean install....

Hello,

I have the Dell inspiron 15 5558 and i wanted to know that mine got a partition called the "EFI system partition" which is of 100mb. So, when i will go to clean install of windows 10 to the step to delete all my partitions, will that system reserved partition
be recreated during install? Or i have to click on new, and then that system reserved partition gets created(which will be of 500mb for windows10 according to my research)?

 

Delete or format partition during clean install windows

Step 1:

If the entire hard drive not show as unallocated space, then delete all partitions on the hard drive until it's unallocated (see screenshot below). Select a partition and click on the "Delete" option for each partition.





Step 2:

- Option 1:

Click on the "Next" button. The installation of Windows 10 will begin. All the required partitions are created automatically during the install.

- Option 2:

Select the "New" and "Apply" buttons.













Click on the "Next" button. The installation of Windows 10 will begin.


For more info about UEFI mode and Legacy BIOS mode, look at post #5 in this thread: Cant install Windows 10 because of GPT partition error message

 

Error: We couldn't delete the selected partition. [Error: 0x800701b1] when trying to delete partition during Windows 10 installation

Hi,



Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.



We will need the following information from you to help you further:

• How are you trying to install Windows?
  
• Which partition are you trying to delete?
  

In the meantime, you can refer the steps mentioned below and see if that helps:



Method 1: Formatting the partition



If you are trying to delete one particular partition, you can format the partition and see if that helps. To format the partition, on the installation screen select the partition that you want to format and click on
Format.



Method 2: Using Diskpart command



If you are performing a clean installation on the computer and want to delete all the partitions from the computer, you may try using the Diskpart commands. Follow the steps mentioned below:

1. On the installation screen press Shift key + F10 to open Command Prompt.
   
2. Type Diskpart and hit Enter.
   
3. Type list disk.
   
4. Type select disk 0.
   
5. Type clean.
   
6. Now, close command prompt window and continue installation.
   

Note: Running clean command will erase all the information from the hard drive.




For more information on performing a clean installation, please refer the article

How to Clean Install Windows 10 on a PC Step-by-Step Guide created by PaulSey...



Let us know how it goes.



Regards,

Nikhar Khare

Microsoft Community - Moderator