Clean install saga.

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Here is a weird one..or not.
My trusty Lenovo Ideapad which has been on the insider program since build 98xx would not activate 10565 or any build for some time. Also the Bios and Boot menu things in Lenovo's system were no longer available. I admit that at the time of build 10130 I had to do a clean install and I may have destroyed Lenovo's system partition. I have never had a Windows sticker on this machine as it was a refurb but I certainly was licenced W8 and then 8.1. But it lost that info at some point. I have heard say that Lenovos have an extra Windows sticker under the battery but this machine has to be pried open and I did not want to do that.
Anyway with build 10565 it started being just a bit random. I did sfc/scannow and that came up with a couple of files that it could not fix. So I decided on a reset saving nothing...did that and sfc came up with the same files. Downloaded the ISO of 10565 from Microsoft, made a USB ( no dvd on this machine) and Lo and behold the damn machine is not set up to boot from USB first.
So started W10 and ran setup from the USB and reloaded the O/S saving nothing.
After this ran sfc again expecting all to be correct. but they were still corrupt. By the way, my other Insider machine, a conventional desktop finds everything ok with sfc.
So after a search found a self extracting file from Lenovo that refreshed the Bios. Ran that and then the Bios was back and I could alter it to boot from USB first.

Booted from my USB stick. W10 setup starts and I tell it to clean off everything and make a new load. It runs its own version of parted and then tells me that the disk has a GPT style partition and so it cannot install Windows. It lets me try to delete all the partitions but refuses to apply those changes and then make a new partition. So it would not install Windows. I do not understand why it would not delete whatever was there and then generate a partition that it was happy with.

Anyway I happened to have a USB stick with Linux Mint so I used that to run Gparted which cleared off the disk and to make sure the actual PC was fine loaded Mint. I may decide to keep it as the not terribly fast laptop is certainly faster with Linux than with W10.
 
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The story continues. Just as an experiment I plugged the W10 USB stick in again and booted. Again W10 said it could not install but this time it allowed me to kill off the partitions ( all EXT4) that Linux had built and generate a new NTFS partition. It then installed itself. There were a few updates so I let it do those and then ran sfc/scannow. Lo and behold no bad files. So as the last time I installed by typing set up from within W10 and told the install to save nothing how come it ended up with the two bad files. I dunno.
So I then checked activation status and W10 says it is activated with a 'digital entitlement' . I can only presume that the original Windows licence is kept hidden somewhere in the hardware.
 

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