My windows install has been messed up for months. Exceedingly long boot times have, today, become infinite, it won't boot. Startup repair claims it failed to fix the problem
So i tried doing a reset (keep files) and this failed too, for hours it downloaded and installed things, but refused to boot up
The current state of things now, my Drive has two installs of windows 10 registered, as well as a third: Windows Recovery Environment, which keeps launcching the repair tools on every boot attempt
Its a complete mess and i need to start over with it. But crucially, formatting is not an option. Theres too much stuff on that drive i need to keep. Stuff that is too huge for offsite backup.
So wht i want to do is nuke all windows installs. At least in practical terms. I don't care if the actual files are wiped, but i want to get the drive to a state where the windows installer looks at it and doesn't see any previous installs of windows. Where the disk gives a No Operating System error on startup rather than attempting to boot anything. That seems something close to a clean slate
How do i acomplish this though? Is it possible to nuke the master boot record? Would that do?
Ideally i would like to do a "clean" install of windows, that removes all windows files and then reinstalls it, without affecting any of the other stuff on the drive. I think that's what reset was supposed to do, but it failed
Ive tried just flatly installing windows over what exists and it is Not Working. Using USB installation media, it throws a kernel error, reboots, and then tells me NTOS is missing
So i tried doing a reset (keep files) and this failed too, for hours it downloaded and installed things, but refused to boot up
The current state of things now, my Drive has two installs of windows 10 registered, as well as a third: Windows Recovery Environment, which keeps launcching the repair tools on every boot attempt
Its a complete mess and i need to start over with it. But crucially, formatting is not an option. Theres too much stuff on that drive i need to keep. Stuff that is too huge for offsite backup.
So wht i want to do is nuke all windows installs. At least in practical terms. I don't care if the actual files are wiped, but i want to get the drive to a state where the windows installer looks at it and doesn't see any previous installs of windows. Where the disk gives a No Operating System error on startup rather than attempting to boot anything. That seems something close to a clean slate
How do i acomplish this though? Is it possible to nuke the master boot record? Would that do?
Ideally i would like to do a "clean" install of windows, that removes all windows files and then reinstalls it, without affecting any of the other stuff on the drive. I think that's what reset was supposed to do, but it failed
Ive tried just flatly installing windows over what exists and it is Not Working. Using USB installation media, it throws a kernel error, reboots, and then tells me NTOS is missing
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