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I'm about to build a new pc, with a m.2 drive which i want to use as my windows boot drive on the new pc. My current windows drive is a 120gb ssd, i want to use said ssd as a regular storage drive in my new pc, how would i go about deleting everything including windows on it?

I'm confused as to how to do this/if it will even work, I've looked through the forums and haven't seen a solution to my situation. I want to format 2 1tb drives, one I'm using right now, and another that was used in a different PC to use in a Ryzen build I'm going to do in a few days, and I'm really confused as to how to do it. I want to clear both drives of all their data, do a fresh install of windows, and format them from Intel to AMD with as little complications as possible. I haven't tried to do anything yet, just been researching, but I want to know how to do it when I build my new PC

New to the idea of reformatting a hard drive but I've heard it is a pretty good idea so I think I will do it. My plan is as follows: I have a 3TB HDD and a 500GB SSD that I boot from. My plan is to move all of my "valuable" files like photos and important documents into a folder that I can just put on an external drive. I plan to take screenshots of how my folders are laid out so that I can put them back together in generally the same organizational structure Once I move all the important documents or get copies on an external drive I'll reformat the HDD and SSD so they have nothing on it I plan to re-install windows on my computer. And here is the 2 part question 1: Can I re-use a windows key, like I used the key and disc 4 years ago when I built the computer and then can I use that same key to re-install windows. 2: The key I bought at the time was Windows 8.1OEM, but I currently use windows 10 which I got from that free upgrade thing, and I'd like to keep it that way, so is there any way I can get the windows 8.1 installation to convert to Windows 10 again? Let's just say that works, then I move all my files back from the external drive onto their respective drives and re-install games and other stuff. Wrap up: Is reformatting really worth it, I've heard it is good to do every once in a while but is it a good idea for the regular user? Is there a better way to do it, I've seen ways online of doing a windows factory reset but isn't half the point of reformatting to make sure you get a fresh version of windows w/out any chance of there being a virus in the OS Is there any way to turn my 8.1 OEM OS CD into a Windows 10 OS Can I re-use the key from the 8.1 OEM if the above works

I wanna reformat my old pc. Windows 8. Don’t know where the product key is. Do i need it to reformat my pc? How do i do it? Where can i get a comprehensive guide?

It's been a day and a half of weird PC issues in my general circle of acquaintances, and I haven't experienced something like this before. This afternoon, I was asked to reinstall Windows 10 Home on one of my friend's PCs. He takes good care of his machines and likes to reformat them every once in a while for performance reasons (even though he's never seen any real benefit, but hey, his choice), but had been away from his rig when he wanted to do his yearly reformat of the OS. Since he primarily uses cloud-based storage solutions, he just told me to use the Reset This PC feature in the Settings App and that he'd worry about linking his MS account or otherwise importing his files later. I've used Reset This PC numerous times across many different machines, whether it be due to system instability on my personal rig following two awful W10 updates that couldn't be rolled back successfully or because family members have done something stupid with their machines that could only be solved with a fresh install of Windows. The PC in question has a Samsung EVO SATA SSD as the sole drive, and we know this thing has been a trooper and is in good working order. I booted into Windows, opened Settings, and used Reset This PC to clean the drive fully. I used the local recovery partition option since neither of us have touched the Cloud reinstallation from 2004 yet and didn't want to try a feature we've never driven before. The process started like normal, and reboot into the normal environment. Besides being stuck at 19% for what felt like hours, it proceeded at its normal sluggish pace until it reached 100%. However, instead of normally rebooting into the blue "Please Wait, Installing Windows" screen, it instead booted to the "Scanning C:" and "Repairing C:" screen as if the machine had been shut down incorrectly. This happened about 2 or 3 times from what I saw, but I had been doing work around the house at the time while keeping an eye on it, so it might have done this another time without me realizing. From what I witnessed, it pretty much scanned and repaired from 1% to 100% in a few seconds, and then would boot right back into "Scanning/Repairing." After the final time, it booted correctly into the OS installation screen, and took me to the setup page afterwards. My main question is, should this concern us at all? I'm really curious as to why something like that would happen, because whatever sliver of Windows 10 was there, it seemed insistent on fixing some sort of issue. We've had one bad Windows 10 install over, I'd say, 40 fresh installs between us on many different machines, but that one bad install really screwed us (so unstable, frankly it could've damaged hardware it seemed). I physically investigated the drive, it's recognized in the BIOS and seems to be mounted in the chassis and connected to the Mobo properly. Should I try to reinstall Windows again to be sure of a stable platform?

Hi, I reformatted my PC because there's a lot of files on my SSD that I don't even use anymore. I only reformatted my SSD, not my other 2 HDD. Before reformatting, all my games weren't freezing at all. After though, everything is freezing, even CS:GO. Here's a picture of the graphs in MSI afterburner, I don't know what those dips in the graphs mean so if anyone would be so kind to explain those, maybe that's the problem. I would really love some input before I go and reformat my PC again, thanks! Here's my full PC specs: • OS: Windows 8 Pro - 64-bit • CPU: Intel i5 3570K @ 3.40 GHz • GPU: ASUS STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5 • RAM: Ripjaws 16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 927MHz • SSD: Intel 330 SATA 3 120GB • HDD: 1TB Western Digital WDC, 1TB Seagate ST1000DM003-1CH162 • Mobo: ASUS P8Z77-V LE PLUS • PSU: Coolermaster M2 Silent Pro 850W