Gadgetory

everyone and welcome to Paul's hardware this is my first ever tutorial video this video is all about how to do a clean install of Windows 8 it just so happens that if you've purchased Windows 8 the retail version at least you have gotten a upgrade version and an upgrade means that you need to have an existing operating system installed you need to already have windows xp for example in order to use this version as an upgrade and that's why it's less expensive but that also is what would potentially prevent you from doing a clean installation and if you like computers you probably like doing a clean installation because it just makes everything cleaner and fresher and it's faster and all that good stuff so how do you actually do a clean install with the windows 8 upgrade version well the sort of way that Microsoft would want you to do it is they would want you to take your existing operating system and do a clean install of that now that's all one does eight on top of it but there's some things that might prevent you from doing that for example let's say that you wanted to switch from 32-bit Windows XP to 64-bit Windows 8 you technically are allowed to do that but you're technically if you installed 32-bit Windows XP and then try to do 64-bit windows 8 on top of it it would not allow you to do that now in order to get Windows 8 to install cleanly from a blank drive or SSD or whatever you're installing onto you're going to need to install it first and then do a quick registry edit and then Windows 8 should activate and you should be good to go but for the purposes of this video here's what you will need you will need your retail copy of Windows 8 or the downloaded ISO version of Windows 8 if you go through the really inexpensive thing which is like they're like $40 right now I think through January 31st 2013 40 bucks for Windows 8 pro upgrade version is a great deal so you need that either the actual physical disk like this or the ISO that you've downloaded I'm going to show you guys how to take that physical disk or ISO and make a little loader USB Drive off of it like this you need a 4 gig USB Drive for that and then of course you will need your existing version of whatever OS you're upgrading from so whether it's Windows XP or one of the excuses for 107 and if you're running Windows 7 and you want to keep running Windows 7 that's fine go ahead I have no problem with that you should have no problem with that windows 7 is a great operating system but especially if you're running an older version not one upgrade to Windows 8 and hopefully this video will help you do that let's get started with step one and step one is always gonna be backup your data please backup your data and 100% not responsible for any data loss as a result of this so back up your data backup your apps make sure you've got those stored on a separate external hard drive somewhere else not your computer that you're updating now if you're ok with loading very slowly you can load directly off of the disk that came in your retail package if you want to do that and then you just go ahead and jump ahead to the point where I'm gonna take you guys how to boot off of the disk or off of the USB Drive if you want to do much much faster and you want to make a little bootloader USB thing like that then you should follow these instructions now if you download directly from Microsoft which I haven't been because I haven't done a little $40 deal they should be giving you an ISO to download you download the ISO they want you to burn it onto a disk and they want you to load it what I am doing since I have the disk here is I'm going to be loading the disk into my computer actually my wife's computer yes this has been my wife's computer that I'm using for all of the Windows 8 videos I have been doing and I'm gonna make an ISO from that disk there's a few different apps out there that can do this the one that I have found to work most consistently for me is actually is over quarter I have so recorder Alex Fineman is the gentleman who has created this one can download this the windows 7 version works just fine whether you're using Windows 7 or Windows 8 and yes I am using Windows 8 already sorry I'm gonna load a fresh install of Windows 8 on top of Windows 8 you can do that too now I have my actual DVD drive right there I'm gonna right click on it and is our recorder should give me the option to create an image from the CD or DVD it's yes create an image that will pop a BIOS or a quarter 3.1 and all you gotta do is tell it where to put the image I'll tell it to put it on my desktop I'll label it something useful like win8 64-bit and I will hit save and then I'll hit next and now it's gonna basically go through process take a live data from the disk make it into a little image file of that disk on my desktop alright so the ISO creation is finished the next stuff we want to get the windows 7 USB DVD tool windows 7 USB yes windows 7 USB DVD download tool click on that it's right here I notice this Windows 7 still works for Windows 8 click right here to open that lecture download it the next stuff you're gonna want to take your USB drives make sure there's nothing important on that USB Drive again you need 4 gigabytes minimum this is actually an 8 gig drive it doesn't matter if it's USB 2 or USB 3 USB 2 might give you a little bit better compatibility we've loaded up the windows 7 USB DVD download tool set up this program actually needs to install there it goes I guess that's finished let's see how good the windows 8 search tool is apps ok windows 7 alright so go ahead and then run that and then this is a pretty easy 4 step process step 1 is to choose the ISO file it's right here on the desktop browse to desktop and there's the ISO file go ahead and choose that click next choose the media type we're gonna be doing it onto a USB now for those of you folks who might be downloading the ISO and this is actually where you would make the DVD but again USB is just gonna be much faster although DVD can be an option if you're having trouble getting the USB Drive to boot or just in general it will just be ill be slower ok so I want to choose my drive and when we have one available its my 8 gig flash drive then being copying confirm that you want to erase everything on that drive then I will take a few minutes to format the drive and create the or windows 8 USB installer and the USB device was created successfully so next up I'm going to go ahead and do my clean install a couple things to note I'm just gonna be restarting this computer and doing the clean install right on there so my USB drives already plugged in and my SSD that I'm installing onto is already in there make sure you have your Windows 8 key on you right now I'm guessing if you do the downloadable version that Microsoft will email it to you or something along those lines you do need it before you actually get through the Windows 8 installation so make sure you have that another thing that I recommend at this point is to unplug any drives from your computer apart from the the drives that are going to install the OSM as well as the removable drive that we just made the next thing I'm gonna do is restart and boot off of that USB Drive instead of off of the hard drive now in order to do this you need to access your system bios or UEFI there's a few different ways to do that and there's lots of lots of different UEFI motherboards and they all have sort of different interfaces and different ways they name things but fortunately my asrock board here has a quick boot selection so by pressing f11 I can actually just pull up to select the boot device and boot straight from it that's a really handy feature I know like there's some gigabyte boards that have that and I think a lot of motherboards are really implementing that but if you have an older motherboard for example you might need to hit delete to go into the BIOS and then change your boot order or sometimes you can go into the BIOS and do kind of like this where you just tell it to boot off of this right now but for the time being I am going to boot off of my USB Drive I have plugged in and that's gonna go ahead and start up the windows 8 installer at this point you will stare at a blue new Windows logo for at least a few minutes now don't worry eventually this little spinny thing will pop up and it will proceed with the installation but especially on slower computers you might just be looking at that for a little like a few minutes let's jumping into Windows 8 setup you might notice this is remarkably similar to the way Windows 7 setup looked so choose your language and a keyboard input method click Next we want to install there's also a pair option you can put up with this to do some repairs when it does starting and goes through sup then we'll be able to choose what type of install we want to do and of course we can't forget to input our product key - I told you guys you need the product key up front this time that's one of the big difference between Windows 7 Windows 8 Solutions Windows 8 you gotta cough it up right away and once you've loaded the OS and you're online it will automatically have to be next up accept the license terms and here's where you're going to make the key decision between upgrading and custom if you choose upgrade you can do that and if you're ready at Windows I like XP or anything installed you can do in-place upgrade we want to do custom because we want to clean install now this is sort of a typically formatted Windows 7 drive you'll notice there's two partitions one is the system partition if you're loading onto a different drive bear- going to format it no matter what so I usually go into Drive options I usually delete any existing partitions like so you got a one drag with an allocated space you can make a new partition or you can just click Next and it will do it automatically and this is again very very very similar to Windows 7 installation it'll go ahead and go through this process copying files getting ready installing features and pretty soon it'll be up and running this only takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes next up we'll have a few restarts and again little swirly sign with getting ready and it'll get devices ready and whatnot one really noticeable improvement of Windows 8 over Windows 7 and I say this after having set this computer over here up with Windows 7 a clean install the boot time was like maybe 20 seconds and literally Windows 8 boots in half that time which is pretty awesome and once you've gone through that quick setup and I wasn't timing this specifically I guesstimation is maybe that was 10 minutes but next up of course you want to pick your color goes green oh we need to name this computer next up choose your settings I'm gonna go with Express here although and occasionally I might go in there and change things and then of course we can sign in with our Microsoft ID and this is actually pretty handy to do it will take your settings from different peers and apply them and kind of make you feel a little bit more at home I don't use this email though this is a public email so don't email me at this email address and expect me reply and we're done but does with any clean install there's still of course some work to be done the thing we do need to check on is Windows activation so I'm gonna go to control panel I'm gonna do that very I click in the bottom left to activate my little hidden Start menu we have control panel I'm going to search for activate activation or most of activate and the Action Center should be windows activation if you click on that it will bring up Windows activation and will tell you if windows is activate or not now here is where my experience is going to differ a little bit from yours because this computer already has Windows 8 activated on it this keys already tied to this computer but the difference you're gonna see is right here it might say Windows was unable to activate and it does that because it detects that it was a clean install and you have an upgrading you can't do that so what we need to do now is to actually change that in the registry to allow Windows to activate properly in order to do that we're gonna take some advice from our friends at 7 forums so the site we're honest 7 forms calm the articles windows 7 clean install with the upgrade windows 7 version and this sort of is the old way that I was used to do this same sort of thing with Windows 7 the thing here that we want to get to this is a part that talks about the registry edit there's a registry edit and then there's a quick command prompt entry they have a little file you can download I'm not gonna recommend doing that although I've heard it does work but usually I just do it myself so we want to go in the registry we want to navigate to this registry folder and then we want to change one value from media boot to install so I'm gonna right click down here again I'm gonna go to run to bring up the command prompt I'm gonna type in regedit re GE di t and hit OK this needs to run as an administrator and it will ask you next up we're gonna navigate H key local machine software microsoft windows currentversion and then all the way down to maybe that's the last one ah set up and then hoobie alright so set up booby Oh OBE under the OOBE folder you'll see in our registry and sheet called media boot installed double click it you'll find the value to be one change the value to 0 it's ok now folks please bear in mind that editing is a very very tricky task and really you do not want to do anything else in here please do not again I'm not responsible for anything you do to your computer but I mess around with that stuff next up open an elevated command prompt guess what with Windows 8 not only do they give you the option to load a command prompt here from the hidden Start menu but also command prompt admin so that's what I do command prompt admin once again user account control ask for your permission to do what you just told it to do and then we want to type this command s L and G are in a space the Nash re-arm hit enter wait a moment then I get a little pop-up that says command completed successfully please restart the system for the changes to take effect hit OK get out of there and then restart I'm gonna do this by hitting alt f4 from the desktop going to restart after the restart windows should read should load back up and should activate properly and it'll do that in the background you won't even notice anything happened the only way you can do it really is by going back to the sort of search go back to the control panel again and looking up the windows activation and then you'll be able to find out yes windows activated and you're good to go there you go guys windows 8 is now installed and I installed it cleanly without to me to first install Windows XP or the windows operating systems that I was legitimately upgrading from I hope you guys have found this video helpful and informative if you'd like to find more just like it you can check out my Paul's Hardware YouTube channel that's youtube.com slash Paul's Hardware don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you next time