TalkChess.com

Murat wrote:Windows 10 creates 2 extra partitions on a hard drive for recovery. These can not be deleted or formatted by normal methods.

Seriously?

What idiots. Imagine if Microsoft used that level of creativity to make software that consumers actually want.

They are pretty good at the monopoly game. They are great at manipulating the press. They aren't bad at hiring pro MS spammers on discussion forums. After 30+ years, those are the only games they still understand. Ironically, writing good software... not so much.

The same extra undeletable partition is also being created under windows 7 and 8 depending on BIOS settings for controlling hard drives.
Apparently Macs are not immune from this practice.

Here is the relevant article.

http://www.howtogeek.com/215349/how-to- ... n-windows/

If you have enough money, it could be the right time to install the OS on a SSD. You can keep your actual HD as a second disk, setting the SSD as the primary one. Then you can easily format or re-partition the old disk.

After a download of Windows 10 and allowing it to install on a PC for general use, we found there was no way to give it an account with limited rights. Maybe there is now but we had to create a child account with Microsoft and then the 'child' had to give permission to his parents using his new Microsoft account we had to create. The email for giving this permission never materialized.

Luckily my colleague knows quite a bit about Linux and PC repair. A bit like Robert's advice I think, he clean installed a Windows 7 CD, after formatting the old drive with Clonezilla. Clonezilla is based on Linux so that is probably why it worked. I don't remember exactly what he did but we encountered no snags. I, personally, certainly hope the Windows 10 installation is completely gone, for the next few years anyway. I prefer Windows Xp over 10.

For somebody else we now, just a week ago, tried a clean install of Windows 10 after he himself had upgraded his Windows 7 to Windows 10. The upgrade Windows 10 gives you a key which you can then also use for a clean install of 10. You have to reinstall all your old software after this, but at least the registry is relatively clean again.
The alternative was reinstalling Windows Vista because the Windows 7 key was lost somewhere in space. And my colleague preferred a clean install over the recovery process of windows 10 back to 7. I maybe prefer Windows 10 clean install over a Windows Vista reinstall. So far everything is working, but it is early days. If necessary, we could always install Linux and be rid of all the Windows sorrows.

Eelco de Groot wrote:The upgrade Windows 10 gives you a key which you can then also use for a clean install of 10. You have to reinstall all your old software after this, but at least the registry is relatively clean again.

You will not get a written key, but you current hardware configuration would register itself on Windows registration servers after clean install.

The alternative was reinstalling Windows Vista because the Windows 7 key was lost somewhere in space.

There is 3rd party software that fetch the key from registered system.

Yes exactly, my colleague used a program, to get the Windows 10 key. With that we could install a clean Windows 10. I din't know if it would have been possible to get the Windows 7 key back, maybe, if we could have restored Windows 7 and then ran the program. But we could not be 100% sure it had been a legal copy, there was no way to know and the installation had been done by somebody else. It was probably legal but there was no CD rom of it anymore.

Terry McCracken wrote:How can you completely remove Win 10 from your hard drive? A complete low level format? Are there tools out there that can do it? I want to restore Win 7.

Nuke the partition table using something like a live Linux distro, then repartition with the Windows installer. That's what I'd try anyway. Failing that, swapping the drive for a new one should also work.

A low-level format is something else that can't/shouldn't be done by consumers on recent hardware.