Windows 10 Reinstall.

Hi All,
Am I right in thinking if I do a fresh reinstall of windows 10 from the website will I lose all data, files and programmes on my computer? I know its a stupid question but I'm trying to weigh it up whether its worth doing it or not. Is there any way of backing up the data on a hard drive and disconnecting it or any other way?

Cheers

Millward18 said:

Hi All,
Am I right in thinking if I do a fresh reinstall of windows 10 from the website will I lose all data, files and programmes on my computer? I know its a stupid question but I'm trying to weigh it up whether its worth doing it or not. Is there any way of backing up the data on a hard drive and disconnecting it or any other way?

Cheers

Click to expand...

It depends on you’re setup, if like most you have one drive for windows and programs, and a second for data, then you can just wipe the windows drive and reinstall. Secondary drive won’t get touched.

If you have everything including data on your windows partition, you’ll need to copy off your data first before wiping.

SpyderTracks said:

It depends on you’re setup, if like most you have one drive for windows and programs, and a second for data, then you can just wipe the windows drive and reinstall. Secondary drive won’t get touched.

If you have everything including data on your windows partition, you’ll need to copy off your data first before wiping.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your response! Will have a look when I'm home from work, yeah I've got a m2 drive for windows and programs, and a hard drive for games, photos and random stuff. So you are able to choose which drives to wipe on the reset page?

Thanks

Cheers

Millward18 said:

Thanks for your response! Will have a look when I'm home from work, yeah I've got a m2 drive for windows and programs, and a hard drive for games, photos and random stuff. So you are able to choose which drives to wipe on the reset page?

Thanks

Cheers

Click to expand...

I wouldn't recommend wiping via in built wipe in windows 10, that's a fairly unproductive way of doing it.

Best way is to download a current image and burn to USB from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10 using the windows 10 media creator tool.

First part of installation asks you which disk and partition you wish to install, delete all partitions on that disk and reinstall to that disk.

SpyderTracks is of course quite right that if you have an M.2 drive for Windows and programs and a hard drive for games, photos, and other stuff, then reinstalling Windows on the M.2 drive will not touch anything on the hard drive. There are some 'gotchas' you should be aware of though.

1. I would expect that all your games will need reinstalling. I don't game so I can't be sure, but I expect that although most of the game software is on the hard drive there will be lots of critical information on the Windows drive which will be lost by a reinstall of Windows.

2. All your browser bookmarks, history and the like is probably stored on the Windows drive, it's all in the C:\Users\your_name\AppData folder. Also in there is a bunch of configuration data for all your other applications, some of which you might want back when you reinstall those applications.

I would thus advise that you backup the C:\Users\your_name\AppData folder in it's entirety to a USB stick or similar so that you have this user data available after the reinstall of Windows.

ubuysa said:

1. I would expect that all your games will need reinstalling. I don't game so I can't be sure, but I expect that although most of the game software is on the hard drive there will be lots of critical information on the Windows drive which will be lost by a reinstall of Windows.

Click to expand...

If it's a Steam installation, just make sure you backup the steam apps folder, you can then cut and paste it back or point steam to it once it's reinstalled and you don't need to reinstall anything. Steam is excellent that way. Plenty of guides on the web on how to transfer your steam installation.

Thank you SypderTracks and ubuysa!
I have managed to reinstall a fresh version of windows via the method you advised me. For Steam it appears I needed to change the pathway back to my hard drive for my games to be picked up as 'installed'. However I may have lost my progress for games like the witcher 3 and spec ops for mw2 .

I'll keep you posted if I encounter any problems.

Thanks