To do this, open Disk Management (right click Start, select Disk Management), right click C: partition and select Shrink Volume:ġ.5) Right click new partition, select New Simple Volume:ġ.6) New Volume Wizard will open. If you have other computers available on network, or if the hard disk on your device you want to reinstall already contains additional partitions, you can skip these step and continue from step 1.8.ġ.3) Create a partition to store Windows ISO image and driver installers by shrinking the C: partition. Steps 1.3 through 1.9 are required only if you have no other computers available on your local network, and your device only has Windows partition C. If the device you want to clean reinstall is your only available device, download ISO and driver installers on it. In that case download ISO and drivers on that another PC. If you have another PC available on your network, clean reinstall without DVD or USB can be done over network. I've tried to make instructions as complete as possible to be sure that any user even with limited knowledge of Windows can manage it by following the instructions to the letter. The instructions might look complicated but trust me, this is an easy and straight forward procedure. This method can of course also be used even if you have DVD or USB device available as an alternative method to clean install. Screenshots are from a simulation on a Hyper-V virtual machine but the method shown will be and work exactly the same on any PC, laptop or tablet regardless if the machine in question is UEFI / GPT or BIOS / MBR device. This tutorial will show how to do this, how to clean install using it without any external media. Short: I had to find a way to install without any external media, and be sure installers for network drivers would be available after installation. Otherwise the tablet would be just a worthless brick, a Windows device without network / Internet access, no way to add and install them and therefore unable to install rest of the drivers. These drivers would need to be manually installed after the installation. I knew from earlier experience that when clean installed, although Windows 10 usually is pretty good in finding and installing correct drivers, setup would be unable to find correct network drivers for this device (a tablet with Intel Atom CPU). I wanted to clean install wiping the hard disk (removing and recreating Windows partitions). In addition, to get more storage space I had removed factory restore partition and extended C: drive to that freed space. I had no SD cards available and even if I had found one, Windows installation can't be booted from SD card. Due my own actions the only USB port was broken, not recognizing any USB flash drives. Sometime ago I had an interesting dilemma: A Windows tablet simply refused to upgrade from Windows 10 version 1607, the Anniversary Update.

Fresh install of windows 10 from usb