Left USB boot drive in during new build. Did I re-write Windows 3 times or did I install 3 separate partitions of Windows?

BattleToads · March 3, 2020

(topic)

Built a new PC and left the USB drive that I had Windows installed on in the PC for three boot cycles. Each time it asked what I wanted to do and insisted that there was already a partition of the one drive I have in the machine which could not be written to. (~600MB)

I'm assuming I have 3 instances of Windows on this drive. Nothing else is on it. How can I wipe and correct this problem before installing all my games, files, etc?

BobVonBob · March 3, 2020

Windows makes 3 partitions when it installs, I believe it's one for the bootloader, one for recovery, and one for the actual OS/storage. If you didn't go through the entire install process more than once you haven't installed Windows more than once.

BattleToads · March 3, 2020

The USB drive was selected on the BIOS screen as the primary boot device. When the PC rebooted after installing windows 10, it rebooted with the USB drive and prompted me to install windows again. This happened once more after that, and it ended up going through the installation process 3 times. After pulling the USB drive, it gave me what looked like a choice of 3 different windows to boot. I selected the first one and it booted to a home screen as it should. I just want to know if I now have 3 different instances of Win 10 on my hard drive, and how to fix it if that is the case.

Beerzerker · March 4, 2020

You'll have to go through the installation process AGAIN and this time delete all partitions to start off new.

Let it install to the partition it's supposed to after it sets up the reserved, recovery and primary partititons. It will do the OS install and and upon reboot, when it asks what you want to do, leave it alone.

It should eventually timeout (About 10 secs) and proceed to boot with the correct Windows partition.

From that point on ignore the prompt and let it do it's thing even if it has to reboot a few times during all this.

Do that until the entire install process is finished, remove the USB drive and just go with it.