I botched windows 10 install

vishy92 · August 3, 2020

Hey!

I wanted to reinstall windows 10 and in a rush i selected the wrong drive. I immediately reset the pc thinking its fine, but now my secondary drive has windows files all over and it wont let me delete them.

Anything I could do? There is a lot of data on the secondary drive so i would like to avoid a backup and format.

Help greatly appreciated!

kelvinhall05 · August 3, 2020

The easiest option would be to just copy over important files, wipe the drive, and copy the files back. You could try to manually delete all the Windows folders and files using an external Linux USB or something, but it's way more hassle. Just copy, wipe, and copy back.

vishy92 · August 3, 2020

9 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

The easiest option would be to just copy over important files, wipe the drive, and copy the files back. You could try to manually delete all the Windows folders and files using an external Linux USB or something, but it's way more hassle. Just copy, wipe, and copy back.

Hmm I wanted to avoid that as my laptop is slow. Guess I'll do that then. Thank you!

homeap5 · August 4, 2020

There is also other method - just do nothing. These files are not harmful and probably do not take more than 1% of your precious space. Just ignore them.

Also - you can use tools to delete protected folders.

vishy92 · August 7, 2020

On 8/4/2020 at 10:33 AM, homeap5 said:

There is also other method - just do nothing. These files are not harmful and probably do not take more than 1% of your precious space. Just ignore them.

Also - you can use tools to delete protected folders.

I just formatted the drive, but thanks!