Reset Windows 10 back to factory

Reset Windows 10 back to factory

^{Created: 2021-04-07 21:09:57 | Last modified: 2021-04-07 21:31:26}
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How to reset Windows 10 back to factory settings.

Here are some instructions of how to reset windows back to factory settings. Following this process will remove all files on your system and reinstall Windows from the recovery partition.

1) From inside windows click on the start button and type in Settings, then click 'Settings'

2) From the settings app you will see an option down the left hand side called Recovery. Click Recovery and then click the 'Get started' button. This will load the recovery dialog as shown further down in this article.

Note: If you can't get into Windows for whatever reason, you can access this recovery dialog by repeatedly hitting the F8 button on startup and accessing the Recovery Console and following the trouble shooting options from there.

3) Once the Reset this PC dialog is shown, click the Remove everything option.

4) Click on Remove files and clean the drive
Note: Once you click this option, everything will be removed from your machine

5) Click the Reset button to confirm you are happy to go ahead and remove everything off your machine and re-install the operating system from scratch.

Debugging

We had an issue with getting the following error message when trying to reset the PC

"There was a problem when resetting your PC. No changes were made."

This was due to an issue with build 2004 of Windows 10. To fix this, open up an elevated command prompt and enter in the following command. To open an elivated command prompt, type CMD into the start menu, right click on the Command Prompt app and click 'Run as Administrator'

dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

Once you have run the above command, try run the Reset this PC again