Windows 10 Creators Edition Clean Install

So yesterday I did a clean install of Windows 10 from a memory key. It was for my HP Sprout, which had got itself into a big of a pickle after I upgraded the hard drive. 

I booted from the memory key and up came the setup program. It had a slight whinge about all the partitions on the disk and so I thought I'd get rid of everything. If you press Shift+F10 at the disk management menu in the Windows 10 installer you get yourself a command prompt. Which you can use to load the Windows Disk Partition Tool, diskpart. So I did.

The Windows disk partition tool is strong magic. Like, make your system not work any more and all your files vanish magic. It lets you specify the fundamental arrangement of the storage areas on your hard disk. The Sprout had all these recovery partitions and weird bits and pieces lying around which I really didn't want. (and of course I'd made a backup). So I used the "clean" command. 

I've not used it before, previously I've removed and merged partitions by hand. But clean makes it much easier. Scarily so. I was expecting some form of confirmation dialog when I issued the command but no, it just went ahead and cleared the drive. Windows 10 then had a shiny empty disk to go to town on, and it did. 

The Windows 10 installation process is now very slick. It's fast too. I had a working operating system around 10 minutes after cleaning the disk. And it rounds off the installation with a chat from Cortana to set the final options for your machine. 

I like the Creators Edition very much. The only downside I've found so far is the fact that the old style command prompt has been replaced with the new fangled PowerShell. The command prompt harks all the way back to MS-DOS, and I really like that. PowerShell is way, way, better, in many ways, but I must admit that for me the command prompt is nicer. However, if you get the PowerShell prompt you just have to type CMD and press return, and your command prompt is back in all it's glory....