Format & install over written SSD?

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wandplus

Limp Gawd
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Jan 14, 2020
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I have a SSD with Win8 & Linux Mint. If I want to install Win10 on the SSD and reformat everything. My motherboard is an ASRock B560M-HDV and I'm not sure if you can choose Boot priority the way the BIOS is made now.
 
wandplus said:
I have a SSD with Win8 & Linux Mint. If I want to install Win10 on the SSD and reformat everything. My motherboard is an ASRock B560M-HDV and I'm not sure if you can choose Boot priority the way the BIOS is made now.
Click to expand...
remove all but the one drive, boot off your install media(rtfm for what button to press), once installer is booted press shift+f10 to open command prompt. then run:
diskpart
list disk (confirm disk #)
select disk 0(should be 0, change number to whatever list shows)
clean
close the command prompt and continue install. when it gets to the disk selection, click on you drive and click next to let windows set it up as needed.
 
Just as a second possibility, is it possible to just add the SSD in an existing machine then format the drive inside Windows?
 
I would just boot into bootable windows 10 USB drive (You have to make sure bios is configured to boot from removable media). Once you are in windows, just follow the steps. Windows will detect the drive and you can format it while in there and load windows into it. Of course you will lose your old OS files. To make a bootable media, use Rufus:

https://rufus.ie/en/
 
For what it's worth, I went into BIOS and disabled the #1 Boot priority. (There was only one thing listed, didn't memorize the name.) When I started the computer with a 21H2 Win10 installation disc (in the DVD-RW), it finally gave me the option to format. I tried to delete as many partitions as I could, refreshed the ones I couldn't then formatted the main large partition. So I hope this made a clean installation (because I installed Win10 offline with the disk because I know my mother is paranoid of viruses).

When I was browsing in the options, I did find an option to choose the command prompt. Does that mean I could have typed in "format C:" and it would have worked?
 
If you used a bootable windows DVD, you should be able to delete partitions/format them while in setup. No need to choose command prompt. What is it that you want to accomplish exactly? Do a fresh installation of windows? You can do that with your bootable DVD and format the OS drive to start fresh. If you have other drives attached with data in them, don't let windows touch them, otherwise you will lose your data. Good luck.
 
Was there a partition the windows set up did not let you delete?
You should be able to do them all in the wizard for Win 10 set up, as others noted, no need to open an cmd and do fdisk, windows wizard does it all in a purdy GUI
 
the only reason i suggested cleaning the drive is because it had win8 and linux mint on it already. cleaning will ensure any and all traces of any boot loader or goofy partitions are gone. it takes a whole extra minute to do and can be done from within the installer...
 
Wow, I find this weird but I got mixed up in my messages. The work I wanted to do on my mother's machine is done. However, I had some unexpected surprises trying to work on an old Ahtlon 5400+ machine (that has the SSD with Win8 & Linux). I can boot from the SSD into Windows but for whatever reason, when I hooked up an old PATA hard drive (with Win7) and a PATA optical drive, they're not seen in Windows even if I followed some Youtube videos on how to see the drives. I can try unplugging and unhooking the SSD but that will have to wait for a few days now since I usually have from time to time days where I cook my own frozen diners for several days in a row. I'll have to look into this later...
 
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