Is it safe to delete my partitions on my Surface Pro 3 and reinstall Windows 10?

[Windows Central Question]

Is it safe to delete my partitions on my Surface Pro 3 and reinstall Windows 10

I have upgraded my Surface Pro 3 to Windows 10 and found that I am very low on storage space. After through disk manager, I have found that I have 2 Healthy Recovery Partitions (one which takes 360MB and another taking 5,27GB. I have a healthy EFI System Partition of another 200MB and then what's left of my C drive (around 54GB). I also found a bunch of folders hidden in my C drive which are related to the upgrade to windows 10 which I don't think are needed anymore.

What I have decided to do is to clear my entire C drive which means removing all the partitions and reinstalling windows 10. I have my product key handy and created a bootable USB of type FAT32 with a win10 installer created from the Windows Media Creation Tool.

If I clear my C drive as mentioned, I understand that it will create a recovery partition on it's own. I would like to confirm this. Also, is there anything else that I should be aware of? Finally, is there any way to identity which of the recovery partitions belongs to Windows 10?

 

[kcaneiro]

Don't do it.

I just spent the entire weekend recovering this. It appears that Microsoft changed the licensing policy and I read the article and thought - this doesn't apply to me. Here is the article: No more Windows 10 keys for Insiders; post-RTM installs must be on previously activated PCs

What I did was exactly what you are proposing. I had Windows 10 running and I decided that I wanted to wipe everything and load from scratch. I deleted the partitions and had Windows 10 create new ones (including the recovery partition). What happened afterwards was that no matter what I did, I couldn't activate Windows. So then I started looking for utilities to find the OEM key that is burned into the Surface Pro 3 - and that key wouldn't work because it is a Windows 8 key.

Then I had problems with BitLocker because the partition order wasn't correct and the recovery partition wasn't correct. So I found a few articles that stepped me through the problem using DiskPart (not easy...)

Finally, I found another article that said that no matter what I did - there was no way to activate - so I downloaded the Windows 8.1 media creator - created a USB startup key - and went at it again. This time, installing Windows 8 - downloading the WiFi/network driver and then connecting my Microsoft account. Then I downloaded the Windows 10 media creator - created another Windows 10 install and did the whole thing again. Then I used those instructions to fix the partition order and recovery partition - then fixed BitLocker.

That was the long answer - the short answer IS NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Keith

 

[xuanphucn]

Don't do it.

I just spent the entire weekend recovering this. It appears that Microsoft changed the licensing policy and I read the article and thought - this doesn't apply to me. Here is the article: No more Windows 10 keys for Insiders; post-RTM installs must be on previously activated PCs

What I did was exactly what you are proposing. I had Windows 10 running and I decided that I wanted to wipe everything and load from scratch. I deleted the partitions and had Windows 10 create new ones (including the recovery partition). What happened afterwards was that no matter what I did, I couldn't activate Windows. So then I started looking for utilities to find the OEM key that is burned into the Surface Pro 3 - and that key wouldn't work because it is a Windows 8 key.

Then I had problems with BitLocker because the partition order wasn't correct and the recovery partition wasn't correct. So I found a few articles that stepped me through the problem using DiskPart (not easy...)

Finally, I found another article that said that no matter what I did - there was no way to activate - so I downloaded the Windows 8.1 media creator - created a USB startup key - and went at it again. This time, installing Windows 8 - downloading the WiFi/network driver and then connecting my Microsoft account. Then I downloaded the Windows 10 media creator - created another Windows 10 install and did the whole thing again. Then I used those instructions to fix the partition order and recovery partition - then fixed BitLocker.

That was the long answer - the short answer IS NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Keith

can you help me with my surface pro? I am having an issue with it. I accidentally deleted all the partitions when i installed linux. The recovery partition is gone too. Now that it won't boot into the usb recovery image that I downloaded from Microsoft. I really don't know what to do now