Goal : Wipe and Clean

[RedTail]

Greetings,
I am confused. When I re-installed windows 10, there was never a option to designate what HD I wanted the install to goto much less partition. Under disk management, I am showing two drive letters with windows? Strangely, one is "windows" and the other is "WINDOWS" in all caps. Therefore, I have reason to believe that windows 10 is installed on two different hard drives which seems very in-efficient and quite irritating. How can I check this for sure. My goal today is to wipe all hard drives and have windows 10 one one drive. I need help with testing and procedures? Anybody game to help me?
Thanks,
Red

 

[deustroop]

Assuming there are two active drives, disconnect one, (either physically or disengage the port for one so it does not show up in the boot menu), then install windows. Never give windows the opportunity to split an install between several drives . It just loves to do that.

 

[mikeymikec]

How did you go about doing a reinstall? It seems to me more like you did a reset or something similar.

+1 deustroop's advice

 

[RedTail]

Absolutely, in the future I am going to disconnect any drives that that the OS will not be going on. I assumed that Windows 10 would be designed where I would get a option to the drive letter for the install. How stupid is that? I simply put the win10 cd in and it never gave me the option. So, I really need help with just getting this horse and cart out of the mud. First, how do I know what drive the OS is presently on? In windows explorer, it is showing only one windows symbol? Would this be the drive the os is running off of? I guess the next step is to format? Directions would be awesome. Thanks for your help!!
Red

 

[deustroop]

Shut down, pull a drive, reboot. You can find the OS drive that way. The install sounds like a fresh install where there is no data to preserve, so it doesn't appear to matter where the OS is since I suggest reinstalling. Pick one , disengage the other and install, then clone it to the second.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Look at the volumes in Disk Management. Better yet, show us a picture.

Which patition / volume is the "boot" and "system" listed for?

"system" is the bootloader drive, and "boot" is the OS drive.

If those two are split between two different physical drives, then you've got some work to do, as pulling either physical drive will result in an un-bootable OS.

 

[RedTail]

 

[VirtualLarry]

Photobucket's not playing nice, saying you need to update your acct. to enable 3rd-party hosting. Which, I think, costs money now.

Try another site, or fix your photobucket image?

 

[RedTail]

https://photos.app.goo.gl/lyx20Onq4MtqL1oE3

 

[VirtualLarry]

You have one OS volume, that's labeled as (boot), also as C-colon.

You have two "EFI system partitions", on different physical drives.

I would disconnect the drive with the "EFI patition", but no (boot) volume, and see if it boots with the other one.

 

[deustroop]

Like Larry said, things do not look too bad. The C drive in the image looks fine except it has two recovery partitions. Make a note to delete the larger one.
You say you want only one OS drive, so format everything else after saving any data you may wish to keep--can put it on the c drive.I can see the problem identifying the drives as they are all around the same size.
If you do not wish to keep the current installation on the C drive, then pull the drives you do not want as the C drive and reinstall windows on the one still online. .

 

[RedTail]

Thanks everyone for your help!!!! Its been so long since I have re-formated a drive. Is the windows format sufficient. Meaning if I right click on the drive and simply hit format, is that sufficient?
Thanks,
Red

 

[RedTail]

So apparently there are two sets of windows program files on the c drive. This is my samsung 960? How should I go about deleting all partitions on this drive and doing a clean OS install on the drive? Should I use partition magic then insert the windows 10 cd?
I have pulled all drives and physically labeled them for future reference.
Thanks,
Red

 

[Ketchup]

If you already have the data saved off, Windows setup will allow you to nuke and build partitions.