I need to reinstall win 10 - no discs

[Loggerjack]

Hi Paul,

I wasted today going down a blind alley. I spent hours trying to get my windows accounting programme to work on my Linux OS using an emulator (WINE). If I'd succeeded, I wouldn't need to re-install Win 10. But I didn't so I do. 😞

But I probably won't get a chance before next weekend and I don't want you to think I've disappeared without showing my gratitude for your friendliness and hard work. So I'm going to mark your first answer as the best one. But thanks for all your other help and suggestions too. I'll get this sorted in the end, and it will be because of you. It's people like you who enable people like me that make the internet a place of such great potential for everyone.

Cheers,

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

If you can't do it with a bootable disk, remove the disk drive, put it in a USB notebook hard drive enclosure, get a windows PC again, plug the drive enclosure into the PC, and use the windows disk management tool to delete the partition and format it MBR-NTFS.

If you don't have a hard drive enclosure, this is the cheapest thing I can think of that you can use...

https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Adapter-Cable-Converter-Drives/dp/B01H1I9X60/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=15...

Here is the service manual.  The downside is that it is pretty difficult to get to where the HDD is located.

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c05122688

[Loggerjack]

Thanks, that's a great plan. I feel much more confident about that than the partition wizard plan. I've seen more accessible HDDs but the instructions are clear and I don't foresee any difficulty.

I've got an old 2.5" HDD in an enclosure as an external backup drive. I can use that enclosure.

At the moment there are 3 partitions on the HDD : 500MB, 980GB, 10GB (approx). I'm guessing there are manufacturer's files (HP?) on the 1st, Linux OS on the 2nd, I don't know what on the 3rd, maybe some sort of reserved area for Linux or a hangover from the initial windows installation.

Should I delete the 2nd partition before formating it, or just select it and format it? Should I leave partitions 1 & 3 alone?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

I would delete all of them.

Create and format one large partition.

[Loggerjack]

There's no risk that one of them might have essential files/data on it? I suppose not otherwise i wouldn't be able to replace the HDD if it broke or I wanted a larger one. OK, I'll do it.

I have to go to bed now. I'll try to find time for this during the week. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

If you start with a clean disk, there aren't any files on those partitions that if they were deleted would cause any problems.

It would be easier to partition and format the entire hard drive.