Question Windows corrupted, not enough space to reinstall pls help

[AccountPlease]

So a few days ago my OS corrupted. Not sure how, to be perfectly honest, probably from the way I shut it off that night if I had to guess. By corrupted I mean it is stuck in the attempting repairs loop and I cant get past the boot screen (though one time I left it over night and it got to the recovery screen where I could access the cmd.)

Regardless I went out and got a flash drive and created a win10 boot drive, currently in the process of reinstalling only to find that none of my drives has enough space and can't reinstall. Any possible way I can wipe my either of my two drives in any sort of way without having the ability to actually boot the PC?

It sounds impossible to me, but y'all are wizards and ** so hopefully one of you can work a miracle.

P.S. I dont care about any of the files on my drives, all of it is just games and other files that I can just redownload if I want them so no loss. And it's been far too long since I partitioned so I'd like to avoid that if possible, at least without proper guidance.

Thanks for any help and suggestions.

 

[Gam3r01]

When you boot from the flash drive to do the windows install you can select the drive you want to install it to and wipe it from the windows install process.

 

[AccountPlease]

When you boot from the flash drive to do the windows install you can select the drive you want to install it to and wipe it from the windows install process.

Okay well I finally got a error code and learned that my ssd was corrupted so I removed it, but the hdd partition won't allow me to install windows onto it.

"Windows can't be installed on drive 0 partition 1."
"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style."

Frustration.exe

Possible to change the partition somehow?

 

[USAFRet]

During the install, you delete ALL existing partitions on the drive in question.

Read this thoroughly:

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows... forums.tomshardware.com

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

while the tutorial USAFRet linked is nice and handy for the actual install, it won't really help you with the corrupted drives.

So here's what you gotta do.

Plug the flash drive into the PC you used to make it bootable.

Run command prompt as administrator then type in the following commands and pressing the ENTER key after each line.

diskpart

list disk

select disk # (where # is the number corresponding to the flash drive)

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format quick fs=fat32

You can now exit command prompt once it's done.

now use the media creation tool to make a bootable flash drive.

Once that is done, go ahead and remove any extra drives from your PC so that only a single drive is inside and that drive is the one you want to install windows to.

plug in the flash drive and boot up the PC and then boot from the flash drive.

go into the repair section of the installer (located underneath the big install button)

from here make your way to the advanced section and get into the command prompt.

once inside this command prompt, proceed to do the exact same thing I had you do above to the flash drive, but this time do it to the drive you want to install windows to and instead of doing "FS=FAT32" you want to do "FS=NTFS" so that it gets formatted for being a hard drive.

then you can exit the command prompt once done by typing the word "exit" and pressing enter, do it once to exit diskpart and again to exit the command prompt.

now reboot the PC by pressing the power button once to turn it off and again to turn it back on and load back into the installer then proceed to go through the tutorial that was linked above.

Once windows is installed and you've made it to the desktop and done all the windows updates and such, you can shut off the PC and install any extra drives, then turn the system back on and go into command prompt within windows running it as administrator and do the cleaning/formatting process I listed above again but do it to your extra drives and making sure to format them as NTFS and not FAT32.

and that should be it. You should be able to install windows properly to your main boot drive and be able to use your other storage devices without any issues from now on.

just be safe about what you download and install onto your system and always use an adblocker for web browsing.

I suggest uBlock Origin for Firefox and Chrome.

 

[USAFRet]

while the tutorial USAFRet linked is nice and handy for the actual install, it won't really help you with the corrupted drives.

So here's what you gotta do.

While going through diskpart and clean will wipe the drive, that tutorial has specific steps for deleting all existing partitions, and starting with a blank drive.
Section II, Step 6 & 7.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

While going through diskpart and clean will wipe the drive, that tutorial has specific steps for deleting all existing partitions, and starting with a blank drive.
Section II, Step 6 & 7.

I know you can do delete and stuff using the GUI diskpart in the installer under the custom install section, but in the event that something is slightly corrupted making it so that the GUI interface is not going to work (which is what the OP is making it sound like) then doing things through CMD is better. Especially since using the GUI manager in the installer is not different than when doing a format using Explorer inside of windows on a drive. It just formats/wipes but doesn't do a proper clean, and like I said, the OP is making it sound like the GUI isn't doing what it's supposed to when it comes to deleting the drives so I was offering a more sure fire way of getting the drive cleaned so that it would actually install Windows to it.

 

[USAFRet]

I know you can do delete and stuff using the GUI diskpart in the installer under the custom install section, but in the event that something is slightly corrupted making it so that the GUI interface is not going to work (which is what the OP is making it sound like) then doing things through CMD is better. Especially since using the GUI manager in the installer is not different than when doing a format using Explorer inside of windows on a drive. It just formats/wipes but doesn't do a proper clean, and like I said, the OP is making it sound like the GUI isn't doing what it's supposed to when it comes to deleting the drives so I was offering a more sure fire way of getting the drive cleaned so that it would actually install Windows to it.

"none of my drives has enough space and can't reinstall "
Sounds simply like trying to install to the wrong partition. Not "corruption".

The install gui doesn't just format, you can delete the actual partitions.
Yes, the diskpart and clean wipes the whole drive in one try. But may not be needed.

 

[AccountPlease]

while the tutorial USAFRet linked is nice and handy for the actual install, it won't really help you with the corrupted drives.

So here's what you gotta do.

Plug the flash drive into the PC you used to make it bootable.

Run command prompt as administrator then type in the following commands and pressing the ENTER key after each line.

diskpart

list disk

select disk # (where # is the number corresponding to the flash drive)

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format quick fs=fat32

You can now exit command prompt once it's done.

now use the media creation tool to make a bootable flash drive.

Once that is done, go ahead and remove any extra drives from your PC so that only a single drive is inside and that drive is the one you want to install windows to.

plug in the flash drive and boot up the PC and then boot from the flash drive.

go into the repair section of the installer (located underneath the big install button)

from here make your way to the advanced section and get into the command prompt.

once inside this command prompt, proceed to do the exact same thing I had you do above to the flash drive, but this time do it to the drive you want to install windows to and instead of doing "FS=FAT32" you want to do "FS=NTFS" so that it gets formatted for being a hard drive.

then you can exit the command prompt once done by typing the word "exit" and pressing enter, do it once to exit diskpart and again to exit the command prompt.

now reboot the PC by pressing the power button once to turn it off and again to turn it back on and load back into the installer then proceed to go through the tutorial that was linked above.

Once windows is installed and you've made it to the desktop and done all the windows updates and such, you can shut off the PC and install any extra drives, then turn the system back on and go into command prompt within windows running it as administrator and do the cleaning/formatting process I listed above again but do it to your extra drives and making sure to format them as NTFS and not FAT32.

and that should be it. You should be able to install windows properly to your main boot drive and be able to use your other storage devices without any issues from now on.

just be safe about what you download and install onto your system and always use an adblocker for web browsing.

I suggest uBlock Origin for Firefox and Chrome.

Don't think it was anything I downloaded or installed (if it were something I downloaded I'd then know what happened before I got the windows error), I didn't download anything except windows updates and steam updates for like the last few months. It was my SSD that went, a friend of mine said they go quickly, had it for like 2-3 years so prob was just around it's time.

Regardless, I forgot to update this forum last night, but yes, I remembered the diskpart command, I learned a bit about it in school, then had to click 'repair windows' instead of 'install windows', which brings up the windows troubleshoot screen. I navigated to the CMD and changed partitions there (after some fooling around, it had been awhile since I was in school, but I got it all squared away). Converted my hdd partition, rebooted and reinstalled windows just fine.

Thank you for the replies though, if I hadn't already done it myself, this would have been the answer! Thanks for replying, friend