How to clean install Windows 10 from a USB drive

[mjgr33n]

I wouldn't say my usage is unusual, in fact I'd say on a forum like this, where re-installing Windows after a major system upgrade which in licencing terms would constitute a different machine, is fairly frequent.

So back to my original question, which to be fair you first answered "do nothing" which is what lead me to believe you've misunderstood my question.

I believe noone here really grasps what you (and I, for that matter) would like to know. Namely, what happens with the product key of that retail Win 7/8.1 you upgrade to Win 10. Everyone keeps blabbing about in-place upgrades, but that's completely beside the point. The point is: will I be able to take that Win 10 I've upgraded to from a retail Win 7/8.1 to a new machine or not (retiring the old machine, of course). And I *still* haven't seen this answered unequivocally. Seems, neither have you.

Yes it has been answered, but to try and explain again in way that makes sense from your perspective -

Nothing happens to the Win7/8.1 you used before as far as MS is concerned it is still activated as a Win7/8.1 activation against the HWID of the machine you on. The old key is not deleted or rendered useless.

There is no new key generated on Win 10 as it uses the generic key to activate against, you cannot take that Windows 10 install from that machine to a new machine. The upgrade process does not check your key it checks activation.

Unless you install your old Win7/8.1 on a new machine, use phone activation and then upgrade again to windows 10, this is the only workaround to moving over win 10 to a new machine and of course it only works in the year free upgrade.

MS have done this quite cleverly so they can get more money in future when peoples machines expire, they have stated that licenses are valid for the length of the machine. Of course if you buy a Windows 10 retail license you can always transfer it when the machine dies or motherboard is swapped out via phone activation etc.

Has that answered your question or is there anything you do not understand still?

[GuidoLS]

I believe noone here really grasps what you (and I, for that matter) would like to know. Namely, what happens with the product key of that retail Win 7/8.1 you upgrade to Win 10. Everyone keeps blabbing about in-place upgrades, but that's completely beside the point. The point is: will I be able to take that Win 10 I've upgraded to from a retail Win 7/8.1 to a new machine or not (retiring the old machine, of course). And I *still* haven't seen this answered unequivocally. Seems, neither have you.

That's not what he was asking - he wants to rotate the same key through multiple machines. You want to know if you can use the 7/8.1 key on a different machine after installing 10, but retiring the old machine.

The answer to your question is - you can use that retail disk to do an upgrade to 10 until July 29th of 2016. You can use the retail disk as the original OS per usual until it goes EOL. There was no clarification on if MS would not activate the machine - just that there would be no support. I *have* been able to activate XP on a single purpose machine in the last week, so I have no reason to believe it won't activate other EOL products. (I have a VOIP dongle that works best with XP, ok with Vista, and kind of poorly with 7 - so I keep a single purpose XP machine going, heavily locked down except for that one piece of hardware and its associated software)

After that, you can no longer do the upgrade for free. The question of if you can move the key generated from Windows 10 or not is unknown - the activation servers are getting pounded as is, so it's doubtful that even if MS allowed a license transfer inside of 90 days without phone activation, you wouldn't be able to do it comfortably online only. Other than some relatively uninformed speculation, *I* see no reason why the upgraded from retail licenses won't be transferable. None of that matters until someone official at MS says, unequivocally, that a is a and b is b and that's final. I've not found that pronouncement. It hasn't been made - at least not beyond the oft quoted MS VIP on the official MS forums. There was a time when that was good enough - now it isn't, for me and a lot of other people. I've sent e-mails. I'm sure others have as well. Perhaps you might consider sending a couple - at least that way, if you don't get the answer you're looking for, you won't be able to say that nobody understands you, instead of you not understanding that nobody has an official answer.

[azrael-]

Yes it has been answered, but to try and explain again in way that makes sense from your perspective -
<SNIP>

That's not what he was asking - he wants to rotate the same key through multiple machines. You want to know if you can use the 7/8.1 key on a different machine after installing 10, but retiring the old machine.
<SNIP>

If you both are correct you essentially do NOT get a free update to Windows 10. Or rather, you get one, but for a year or until you replace the motherboard of your PC, whichever comes first. This might be a moot point for people with pre-built PCs, but for us who build our own the "free upgrade" is more or less a hoax.

@GuidoLS: Seems that you finally agree with me that there is a lack of unequivocal official information as to the state of a Windows 10 that has been upgraded from a retail version of Win 7/8.1. I might take your advice to heart and contact Microsoft about this myself, although I'm not hopeful I'll get a sufficient answer, seeing as noone else seems to have gotten it.

[mjgr33n]

Yes it has been answered, but to try and explain again in way that makes sense from your perspective -
<SNIP>

That's not what he was asking - he wants to rotate the same key through multiple machines. You want to know if you can use the 7/8.1 key on a different machine after installing 10, but retiring the old machine.
<SNIP>

If you both are correct you essentially do NOT get a free update to Windows 10. Or rather, you get one, but for a year or until you replace the motherboard of your PC, whichever comes first. This might be a moot point for people with pre-built PCs, but for us who build our own the "free upgrade" is more or less a hoax.

@GuidoLS: Seems that you finally agree with me that there is a lack of unequivocal official information as to the state of a Windows 10 that has been upgraded from a retail version of Win 7/8.1. I might take your advice to heart and contact Microsoft about this myself, although I'm not hopeful I'll get a sufficient answer, seeing as noone else seems to have gotten it.

You get a free upgrade for life for that machine not a year, it just has to be upgraded at least once in that year, of course the definition of machine is different for those of us that build our own machines, so for us it is not for life, it sucks but that is the way it is and when I come to replace my motherboard I will get new licenses, until then I just consider it a nice buffer for my custom built pc's and my laptops are happy until they are useless

[KeyboardDemon]

I've been trying it for about 6 or 7 hours, here's what happened.

Took my PC out of storage and booted. It wouldn't start, kept going in to Repairing Windows mode but would repair, couldn't restore, couldn't refresh or reset either. Ok, so no big deal, I want to complete a fresh install of Windows 10 when I'm through so lets start by doing a fresh install of Windows 8.

• Installed Windows 8, all good.
• Upgraded to Windows 10, still good.
• Activated, everything still rosy.
• Updates installed ok, restarted PC and tried next set of updates, security updates started downloading and just held at 28% with no sign of downloading any further.
• Downloaded NVidia drivers and ran installer with custom install option selecting just the graphics and PhysX drivers, no 3d or HDMI audio selected, screen went blank and then the PC booted in Automatic repair mode, it wouldn't repair, reset, restore or refresh so I completed a fresh install of Windows 10, logged in and set a restore point this time.
• I've even tried installing the drivers in safe mode

Since then I've been trying to find various ways of getting nVidia drivers to install, nothing seems to work, I've tried older versions, running DDU which disables the automatic driver updates for nVidia drivers. Others are reporting that they have managed to get the NVidia drivers installed successfully, but I can't seem to find a definitive way of completing this, anyone here been successful with getting through this? If so, what did you do?

[stevie lee]

Since then I've been trying to find various ways of getting nVidia drivers to install, nothing seems to work, I've tried older versions, running DDU which disables the automatic driver updates for nVidia drivers. Others are reporting that they have managed to get the NVidia drivers installed successfully, but I can't seem to find a definitive way of completing this, anyone here been successful with getting through this? If so, what did you do?

reinstalled win 7 about a week ago, fully updated it.
I put the nVidia 353.62 drivers on before upgrading to Win 10,
upgraded to win 10
win 10 loaded but without any NVidia drivers showing up.
restarted the computer
NVidia drivers showed up, everything seems to work properly, shadowplay, GeForce experience its all there.
installed drivers on top of them using clean install option, just to be sure the drivers where on properly.
everything's been fine for a few days no problems so far.

[KeyboardDemon]

reinstalled win 7 about a week ago, fully updated it.
I put the nVidia 353.62 drivers on before upgrading to Win 10,
upgraded to win 10
win 10 loaded but without any NVidia drivers showing up.
restarted the computer
NVidia drivers showed up, everything seems to work properly, shadowplay, GeForce experience its all there.
installed drivers on top of them using clean install option, just to be sure the drivers where on properly.
everything's been fine for a few days no problems so far.

I started reinstalling Windows 8 last night, what I thought were issues with nVidia drivers and Windows 10 clashing might actually be issues with something hardware related, right now I suspect it might be an SSD issue. Windows 8 installed OK, started doing the updates and after downloading 87 of 131 updates my system locked up, so I went to bed (this was around 1 in the morning). I woke up about 4 and found my PC had gone into automatic repair, so I restored my system to the same place it was in before I started the updates and it started up ok. But the pattern of installing, updating or installing drivers, hanging during updates/install and booting into automatic repair mode is exactly the same pattern I was getting when trying to install Windows 10, except with Windows 10 it was only happening whilst I was installing the nVidia drivers, but then again, Windows 10 doesn't 100+ updates to install at this current stage.

[BOBELU1980]

you can watch the process of installation here :https://goo.gl/gVjYmB