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    Alienware 17 R3 USB boot/win10 reinstall

    Discussion in '2015+ Alienware 13 / 15 / 17' started by pinco000, Dec 25, 2016.

  1. pinco000

    pinco000 Notebook Guru

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    Hi guys, can someone here please point me in the right directions as Im trying to format both my hard drives and then do a fresh install from USB. It is not as straightforward as it was with windows 7.
    Here I cant see my harddrives and partitions. It just tells me it will delete all files bla bla.
    What I want?
    I want to delete all partitions, even the backup copy for repair. I want to end up with two partitions, C & D, where C will be my ssd drive and D my second hardrive. Then I want to install a fresh copy of win from my bootable USB with win 10 on it.
    Can someone please help or post a link with guide please. It will be much appreciated. Thanks
     
    pinco000, Dec 25, 2016
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  2. 0lok

    0lok Notebook Deity

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    0lok, Dec 25, 2016
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  3. pinco000

    pinco000 Notebook Guru

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    thank you. I managed to organise and delete unnecessary partitions trough one software.
    Find that link veeery informative ..


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    pinco000, Dec 26, 2016
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  4. Bones13

    Bones13 Notebook Guru

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    I'll certainly be using that guide. Although. Might not remove all the "helper" software. Control of driver software, and not loading a bunch of win10 bloatware promises to minimize boot time and meaningless CPU cycles. In addition to removing all the spy stuff. Of course, as I use Chrome, I'm not sure how much they don't see anyhow.
     
    Bones13, Dec 26, 2016
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  5. pinco000

    pinco000 Notebook Guru

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    guys I cleaned my both hardrives of everything but Im not able to start the installation from usb. any ideas why? I setup bios to load from usb but when I go to menu to use the image I cant see usb. I setup the key as per alienware recommendation. Its usb 3.0 8gb kingston key...


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    pinco000, Dec 28, 2016
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  6. Bones13

    Bones13 Notebook Guru

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    from @Phoenix wonderful guide :


    11- Ensure that " Enable CSM" under the boot menu is DISABLED to ensure we are installing Windows 10 in full UEFI mode.

    12- Also ensure that " Fast Boot" is enabled in the boot menu options

    13- Restart your PC and press they key which is supposed to pull up the boot menu options. As an example, for Alienware computers that would be the F12 key,on ASUS laptops that would be the ESC key. On my ORIGIN PC Millennium desktop it is the F8 key; so this depends on your computer really. For more info, refer to your motherboard guide.

    14- Once you have the boot menu infront of you which you would've gotten by restarting your computer and continuously bashing that respective key, you will get 2 options that pertain to the Flash Disk drive, once that has a preceeding UEFI: and one without.

    Select the one which has UEFI: followed by your flash drive name.

    In my case, this was UEFI: SanDisk_Ultra

    This way, we are booting into the Windows 10 installation environment in UEFI mode.
     
    Bones13, Dec 28, 2016
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  7. pinco000

    pinco000 Notebook Guru

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    thanks m8. I managed to get it going. I needed to switch few options in bios, like raid turn off, safety boot disable etc.
    Its a nightmare to install win10 compared to win 7, not just because of setting up bios...


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    pinco000, Dec 29, 2016
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    Bones13 likes this.