This has been a HUGE disaster/pain in the *** for me. I'm like THIS close to reverting all my devices to Windows 8.1 Pro and just staying there. At least I had an OS that was fast and didn't have to deal with all these headaches. So everything went fine with upgrades from 8.1 to 10 on every device. One of them I had to force the upgrade through media creat. tool. But, I don't want an upgraded version of 8.1 to 10 with all the old files, partially deleted crap, and programs etc, etc, etc. I, like most us, want a nice clean installed Windows 10 that's fast and snappy like its brand new. So yesterday I tried to do a reset on my laptop since I figured hey that shouldn't be a problem, its an option that is included in windows 10, why wouldn't it work. I got to 99% and I got the BSOD with
face saying "your pc ran into a problem and will reboot now: error no bootable device" So now I was screwed and had to reinstall Windows 8.1 from scratch which im currently on right now. I figured something went wrong, or this is just because this computer is so old (2009). So I have windows 10 installed on my main pc from an upgrade, and again its slow bc of the upgrade. So I tried this process but only selected to reset and just delete files (not clean the drive) this time. Same problem, windows ran into a problem and got stuck on a continuous reboot cycle. Now I am installing 8.1 pro on my main pc from scratch. On my surface pro 2 im downloading the Media creat tool so hopefully I can install windows 10 from scratch and because I went through the upgrade process on both PCs already it should magically activate. But somehow I highly doubt that's going to happen. If not then I will have to reinstall 8.1 pro AGAIN and just stay there because im not settling for an upgraded version of windows 10 that I cant clean install nor reset or refresh. ugh.
(note: I asked @surfacesupport on twitter about clean installing windows 10 on SP2 and they said the only path supported is upgrade and I will run into activation issues if I clean install. I clarified that I already upgraded and want to do it for performance reasons, again they repeated, upgrade is the only possibility.)