Dell Inspiron 1545 - Fresh Install of Windows

In my previous post, I was able to rescue my mom's laptop by replacing its internal HDD (Hard Disk Drive). The next step was to give it a fresh install of Windows. I've reformatted many a computer in the past so I thought that it would be a breeze but like usual, it wasn't.

Buy new Windows license?

Most laptops come pre-installed with Windows and most of the time, they don't bother giving you a copy of the disc installer. Instead, they stealthily suggest that you create a system repair disc which you can boot from in case you mess up your computer in the future. But I've read that system repair discs might not even be able to help if you're installing Windows to a new HDD as it needs information from the old HDD to do its repairs. The better option would be to restore from an image backup that was taken before the HDD failure but most people don't create backups of their HDD.

If you were able to extract the product key from your system before the failure, it should be possible to just download the installer disc image ISO from Microsoft, burn that to some bootable media and use the product key to reactivate.

Having none of these, I needed to buy a new Windows license.

Physical or digital

I pondered whether to buy a physical Windows installer disc or just buy the product key online and download the installer myself. I wasn't willing to drop over a hundred dollars just for an operating system (Windows 10 Home sells for $119.99 at the Microsoft Store as of writing) and I wanted to get it fast. I knew of a website where I could buy Windows licenses for cheap and I went with it and got one for $30. I downloaded the Windows 10 disc image ISO from Microsoft ready to be burned to some bootable media.

Lies, lies, lies*

I went out and bought a small pack of blank DVDs. Each one able to hold 4.7 GB of data. The Windows 10 ISO was 4.42 GB so it should fit, right? WRONG! It turns out that the people who thought of the DVD sizes were thinking in decimal while the computer thinks in binary. The 4.7 GB in the DVD label means 4,700,000,000 bytes (1,000,000,000 bytes per gigabyte). But the computer says there should be 1,073,741,824 bytes per gigabyte. So 4,700,000,000 bytes / 1,073,741,824 bytes = 4.37 gigabytes, the actual capacity of a DVD. No wonder my Cyberlink Power2Go says the disc wasn't large enough!

I went out again and looked for something that can hold 4.42 GB of data. I could have bought a blank Blu-Ray disc which was labeled to hold 25 GB (but was just actually 23.28 GB) , but then I remembered that the laptop's optical drive only supports DVD±RW. There was the dual-layer DVD option which was labeled to hold 8.5 GB (but was just actually 7.91 GB) but I opted for the 64 GB (but was just actually 59.6 GB) PNY USB 2.0 thumb drive I saw that was on sale at $17.

*some DVD packaging include disclaimers in the fine print where they explain the difference between the measurements, but still, it's pretty misleading up front

Making a bootable USB drive

Pro tip: USB thumb drives are not bootable by default

I first tried to just extract the Windows 10 ISO contents to the USB drive, plugged it into the laptop, changed the laptop's boot sequence to look for the USB first, restarted then expected to see the Windows logo. I was disappointed. The laptop was not able to boot from the USB drive. I did some googling and found a short guide on how to make a USB drive bootable. It involves running the Windows command prompt and making use of the diskpart command.

The whole process took a few hours (because formatting 64 GB, correction 57 GB proved to be slow) and I ended up with an unusable USB drive which Windows told me I needed to format before I can use. I knew that method worked in the past for smaller thumb drives, but maybe it couldn't handle 57 GB. Okay, screw that. I instead used Windows 10 Media Creation Tool. It re-downloaded the Windows 10 ISO and gave me the option to burn it to a USB drive, which it will automatically set to be bootable. Sweet!

It only took a few minutes and before long, I had a perfectly usable Windows 10 USB installer. The installation to the laptop went by like a breeze and now the laptop is sporting it's brand new operating system. After the usual drivers and utilities installations and Windows Updates, I plan to create an image backup of the whole laptop HDD to be used for a rainy day.

Post scriptum

I noticed that my 64 GB PNY USB 2.0 thumb drive reports that it only had 32 GB. What?! Was I scammed in that OfficeMax store where I got the USB? I did some light googling and found out that this happened after I made the USB bootable. I wasn't sure if it was the diskpart tool or the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool that did it, but luckily, it was easily fixed by following instructions in a short tutorial. Turns out that only 32 GB was set as the active partition and the remaining space was unallocated. I only had to delete the active partition and re-allocated space to make use of the whole 57 GB.