Installing Windows 10

This blog entry is a continuation of my blog post titled, “How to upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 10 Safely”. Hopefully, you follow my blog and have upgraded to Windows 10 before the FREE offer ended on July 29, 2016. In that blog entry, I walked you through the upgrade process and briefly talked about creating Windows 10 install media in the event of a hard drive failure. Back in October 2015, I speculated that you might be able to use the Windows 10 installation media to upgrade other computers, if you had licensed copies of Windows 7.  Since 2011, I have had Windows 7 running on my computer server and could not find the time to attempt installing or upgrading to Windows 10 after it came out last year.  With the free upgrade deadline fast approaching, I had to make the plunge. (See:  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12435/windows-10-upgrade-faq)

If you did upgrade, I instructed you to burn a Windows 10 install DVD, which I was not sure would work with other computers.  Since the deadline has passed, this blog entry is about installing Windows 10 and the problems that you may encounter.

1. If your hard drives have data or an OS be sure to zero them.  I recommend using MiniTool’s FREE Partition Wizard Home Edition tool, which is amazing.  Download the ISO file and burn it to a CD or load it on a USB drive.  If you are running RAID, as I was, bust it apart in the BIOS leaving every drive visible to the tool.  Pressing the DELETE key on boot uploaded my BIOS settings and from there I clicked on the Advanced tab -> SATA Configuration -> SB SATA Configuration.  From there, change the SATA Port1 – Port4 and SATA Port5 – Port6 from RAID to AHCI.    (See:  http://www.minitool.com/download-center/partition-manager-download.html, https://www.partitionwizard.com/partition-wizard-bootable-cd.html)
2. When done zeroing the hard drives, put the RAID back together by reversing the BIOS directions in step one.  After saving the BIOS RAID settings, you have to enter the AMD RAID disk pairing BIOS.  On my server, I did so by typing Ctrl-F6 upon boot up.  Pair your hard drives and reboot.  Now here is a critical step that I had failed to do, upon boot up pause the BIOS to make sure the disks are indeed, paired properly.  In my case, they were not but I did not know that as the RAID BIOS screen zipped by upon boot up.  It was later after I had spent a few days loading and configuring Windows 10 on a single disk that I learned my RAID 1 configuration was deprecated.  It was hard to catch but I learned that hitting the PAUSE/Break during boot up revealed the following RAID status, which if I could have seen the messages flying by it would have revealed:

RAID option ROM version 3.3.1540.17
© 2011 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All Rights Reserved
ID     LD Name     LD Size         Status
01     OSRAID1     1999.99G    Critical
02     DATARAID1  1999.99G  Functional

Port ID        Device Name
01:01           ST32000641AS     <S.M.A.R.T. Health> <Single Disk 03>

Hit the Break Key to pause BIOS

Problem is detected with Array:01 Critical Status:

A disk member of an array has failed or is not responding.
Please refer to your AMD User Manual for further details.
Press <Ctrl-F> to enter RAID Option ROM utility.

Was this a disaster or what?  I could not have my main computer server running without a functional RAID mirror, so I set about correcting it.  After scouring the Internet for solutions, I downloaded and installed AMD’s RAIDXPERT utility.  However, after installation it would not work under Windows 10. Therefore, I had no choice but to enter the RAID ROM BIOS at boot up and join the disks manually.  I was afraid this would destroy all my work on the server, so I created a system image on my backup device, which I recommend you do from time to time.  (See:  http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/chipset?os=Windows%2010%20-%2064)

1. Creating a system image in Windows 10 is not as straightforward as it was in Windows 7.  For example, if you type system image in the Ask me anything box, it just brings up a bunch of Internet search solutions.  However, if you type backup you will see Backup and Restore (Windows 7), which brings up the old Windows 7 Backup or restore your files dialog.  On the left panel under Control Panel Home, click on Create a system image to back up your OS and data.  You should do this periodically so that you can always move back to a restore point.
2. Once the imaging is complete, Windows 10 will prompt you to create a System Repair Disk.  If you do not have one already, you should do this.  Do not miss the critical step that I did, which is to test the disk by booting from it.  I had two System Repair Disks and could not boot from either one without error after I had destroyed my server again.  My solution was to boot from the Windows 10 installation disk that I had created back in October 2015 and use that to restore my system from the backup image.

The remaining steps are detailed in my book and PDF products on my website at http://thatcybersecurityguy.com. Now that you’re imaged, your computer has to be configured and loaded up with software such as Office, Visio, PowerPoint, MapPoint, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Video Studio, Dragon Naturally Speaking and so on.  There is also a ton of open source software that I talked about in my book. such as CCleaner, PuTTY, gVim, Speccy, SeaMonkey, Firefox, FileZilla, Notepad++, Mozilla Thunderbird, VLC Media Player, Revo Uninstalled, PDFMate,  and so on.

My next blog entry will be about the setup and use of Windows 10 Hyper-V to run a bunch of Linux OSs on the second RAID 1 mirror in my computer server.  I have already started on this and I hope to have guest OSs running on the server in no time.  All the Linux OSs (Fedora, Kali, Mint, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu) are downloaded and ready to install.  In my book I detail how to do this using both VMware Player and Oracle VirtualBox.  This will be my first foray into using the Windows 10 Hyper-V virtualization solution.