Moving Forward With Windows 10

Moving Forward With Windows 10

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the end of security patches and updates to Windows 7 on January 14, 2020 as it ends the ten years LTS agreement. Since it is October and to avoid procrastination, it was time to utilize the Windows 10 that was acquired in 2016 during the free upgrade offer. Over the last three years, the operating system has been stored on a secondary solid state drive, a Samsung 840 pro 256GB solid state drive (SSD), because Windows 7 performed great and no reason real reason to discard it. Meanwhile, the Windows 7 was on a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB which was the first generation of the 3D V-NAND technology and was desirable to utilize it as it possesses a faster read and write speed. Thus, the Windows 10 was to be transferred over by either cloning from the other SSD or a fresh installation. Furthermore, there was some research into the reviews of cloning software such as Aomei, easeUS Todo, and Acronis for the reason that I had some familiarity with Acronis imaging, and no experience with the other two. One online article worth mentioning was windowsreport.com which the reviewers praised the ease and quality and was thorough. Also, the other cloning articles that were return from Google searching had those two cloning software in their list of recommendations as it reaffirmed the selections. Subsequently, the personal files on the Windows 7 SSD were backed up on a third hard disk drive, a Western Digital Black Edition 2TB as to preserve my personal files. After the backup was completed, it was physically unplugged it from the system as to avoid and unforeseen conflicts.

After reconnecting the 840 PRO, I sought out the Windows 10 version, installed additional applications, or personal files as to examine the contents since so much time has passed that result a non updated, bare bones Windows 10 OS install. With this information, it would be wiser to carry out a fresh installation on the 850 EVO instead of cloning for the reason to steer clear of partition resizing and all the updates since 2016. Another benefit fresh install with Windows 10, the ISO operating system is available directly from Microsoft servers in the form of a windows media tool (WMT). The WMT is either burned onto a DVD or transferred onto a USB drive with a leased 8 gigabytes of space. Selecting the latter option, the USB 32GB 3.0 was reformatted before downloading the WMT from Microsoft with nominal speed, but there was a problem. After the second attempt, a brief pop up was noticed from the Avira antivirus detecting a .ini file and blocked it with its real time scanners. This caused the WMT install to fail and provided an error code which was vague at best. After a brief pop up was seen, Avira was the source of the error; the anti-virus was temporarily disabled, and the WMT install was successful on the USB. It’s worth mentioning because if others execute this route then it should be something they’re aware of.

As the project move forward, the 850 EVO SSD usages over several years had to be taken into consideration because there was a lot of personal data ranging from family photos to intimate information like a social security number. Securing personal data is serious and important as it prevents identity theft and financial crimes. Consequently, my options were narrowed down to either a secure erase or format for the reason that physically destroying the SSD was not an option since it will be used as a secondary drive in my laptop. With this in mind, the secure erase was chosen since a format does not remove the data but the data’s pointers. For this purpose, the Asus Hero Maximus 6 motherboard has the capacity for a secure erase, but it refers to a qualified vendor’s list (QVL) for the specific solid state drives supported in view of the fact that it will damage or leave them unusable afterward. Asus currently doesn’t have the up-to-date QVL for that motherboard, so another option was the Samsung Magician software with their secure erase feature. After downloading the latest 6.0 version and installing it on the 850 EVO, the software has step-by-step instructions on installing the secure erase software on a USB. Once the USB was created, BIOS was set to boot to USB first, and the system was rebooted. Upon reboot, the software was loaded, the selections were straight forward, and yet there was another setback. The setback was a security feature in BIOS that placed the SSD in a frozen state as to prevent unauthorized reformatting from intrusive software or security vulnerability. Also, the software recommends unplugging the SSD for a few seconds and plug it back in and reattempt to erase the data. Moreover, it instructs the user to reboot the system with the SSD uninstalled, reinstall it, and try again. Both options failed to work properly and it was determined a secure erase would have to be done by some other third-party software. There was more thought about data store on the 850 EVO and it was decided that a format would be viable since it is a desktop system within a private network, used by family and friends with limited access to some system files, and in my private residence.

After the 850 EVO reformat, the system was power down again as to remove the 840 PRO completely because it will be installed into the laptop at a later date. Then, it was rebooted into the BIOS, and set the boot order to USB drive that contains the WMT first. When the user saves the changes and exits BIOS, the system should boot from the USB drive, and the WMT starts to install Windows 10 from the Microsoft server. During the installation there were some basic setup questions such as time zone, language, and user interface, but when the windows installation requests a verification key, you should skip it.

If you’ve already had a Windows 10 operating system installed on your desktop or laptop, then Microsoft stores the digital signature on their servers.

Finally, the installation of Windows 10 was flawless as there were no error codes, stalls, or the fabled blue screen of death. At this juncture, the initial login was completed, updates were installed, system reboot was clean, and restore points were manually created.