Will doing a full reset (Remove Everything) of Windows 10 be same as formatting it and installing fresh?

[Pubudu Kodikara]

Normally I format my machine for several things... To get rid of a virus, To speed things up, and to Install a fresh version of the updated Windows 10. Will I be able to achieve these goals if I do a full Windows reset?

Will it wipe the malware clean? Can the malware harm it's installation files?

 

Do I have to install the updates again or does it have the latest updates when I reset? Will it also resolve broken updates which sometimes cause some issues?

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Depends ... for the most part I would say yes ... a "reset" will give you a Windows installation free of viruses and other malicious software (other than OEM bloatware..ha).  Obviously ... there could be caveats to this ... like how badly the computer is infected ... if secure boot is enabled/disabled (in other words...possible infection of the efi partition/recovery environment) ... iirc.

 

Anyway ... short answer is yes.  During the reset, Windows RE erases and formats the partition and then installs a fresh copy of Windows.  I'm not sure of any viruses which have affected the RE (not saying there aren't though).

[Mando]

if its for a system refresh then yes a factory wipe is almost as good as a clean wipe, however, if its to recover from malware etc, I would advise nuking partitions of all the drives from orbit and doing a media kit install via usb/iso.

 

A point to bear in mind:  if you have formatted your drives in GPT partitions, if you do a clean iso install, youll need to delete all GPT partitions in the system. I scratched my head for hours on that front last time i did a clean wipe of my games box, all drives set up in GPT and I couldnt understand why windows setup kept failing at drive formatting...it was the other 2 GPT disks in the system. Once they were deleted it completed first time.

 

and if you then think actually to avoid that ill redo them in MBR style, get ready to use Grub etc to rectify  as windows setup is woeful at fixing that conundrum.

 

[Hum]

If you have malware and broken Updates, it is probably better to zero-out the drive and Reinstall from scratch.

 

I did so after the Anniversary ed. corrupted the hard drive.

 

 

Be sure to back up all your persobal files first, no matter which way you decide on.