Upgrade to Windows 10 and Secure Format at the Same Time

dirtychinchilla

dirtychinchilla

dirtychinchilla

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Hey guys,

As per the title really, my girlfriend would like to sell her old laptop as she doesn't use it any more.

It doesn't have Windows 10 on it yet as it hasn't been used for about a year, but can be upgraded. What I need to do is upgrade the laptop to Windows 10, but I'd like to do a completely secure format on the hard drive beforehand.

Any advice??

Cheers!
 
Are people overly concerned about access to deleted files? I know with my drive there is nothing worth having!
 
Run dban on a couple of passes or grab partedmagic and see if it will do an internal secure erase. Download windows 10 onto a usb stick using the media creation tool and then install it once its done. As long as the laptop has a valid 7 , 8 licence it will activate with that serial key. You dont need to upgrade first anymore.

Check that things work if not have a look around for some drivers.
 
kayomani said:
The installer will only do a quick format which could allow for files to be recovered by a full disk scan.
Click to expand...

The option to clean the drive claims to take a few hours which would suggest its doing a bit more then just marking drive space as available for use i.e quick format.

You could do the following

Upgrade to Windows 10 and activate (this ties the activation to your Microsoft Account)
Create Windows 10 install media
DBAN the HDD with as many passes as you like
Reinstall Windows 10 using the install media.

This is where i'm out my depth however, if you want the laptop to re-activate, do you need to then log back onto the fresh install with your Microsoft Account? Then leaving you back at square one as it pulls your sync'd data down from the servers.

EDIT - Doh, as mentioned above your able to install Windows 10 with previous install keys. I had totally forgot about that. Heck, just DBAN it and install from fresh then.
 
Last edited:
The Windows 10 install is meant to activate based on your hardware, not on your hard drive, so it shouldn't matter if it has been DBAN'd or not.

I'd upgrade to Windows 10, ensure it has activated, DBAN it, then reinstall Windows 10 from scratch, skipping the windows key (it should activate once in Windows).

As said, if you make sure you have the new 1511 (TH2) November media then you shouldn't need to upgrade to Windows 10 first, it should just accept your Windows 7/8/8.1 key and upgrade from scratch, meaning you wouldn't need to do an in-place upgrade. Don't take that as gospel though, as I've not tried it - make a full backup first if you do want to try it. :)
 
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