My Two-Hour Windows Reinstall Strategy

There comes a time in every young man’s life when you sit down at the PC just after you should be in bed and decide to reinstall Windows to solve your PC problems. Mine came after a week locked in the bedroom with COVID, on the evening when I made my return to my desktop PC after a laptop-bound week in bed, gaming on GeForce Now and the Switch 2. My shit was busted.

A failed Windows update left my desktop suffering from random bluescreens, stutters in games that shouldn’t be stuttery, and just general across-the-board jank with Windows. It was not the triumphant homecoming to my desktop PC that I had anticipated.

After digging deep into the minidump files Windows generates when the PC bluescreens, I found that my bluescreens weren’t happening in any one particular file or driver. After consulting with an expert, I suspected that the failed Windows update was probably the culprit. To confirm, I installed a clean version of Windows 11 on a small portable SSD and ran it for an hour or two to see if I got any bluescreens. At the end of that session, when I hadn’t experienced any wonkiness, I had the confirmation I was looking for. It was time to reinstall Windows, but it was also midnight.

With a live recording of The Full Nerd looming the next morning at 11, and a busy week full of meetings and recordings after that, I realized that if I wanted to get the reinstall done without affecting the rest of my week, this was the time, even if it was midnight on a Monday.

Just under two hours later, my PC was back up and running, with all of my applications installed and everything I needed to work the next day in place. My games were reinstalled and all of my applications were configured just the way I left them on the old Windows install.

So how’d I do that? I’ll explain it by hitting three topics today—first I’ve got a quick primer on how to look at the dump files Windows generates when you bluescreen, then we’ll talk about how I set up my system so that Windows reinstalls are fast and relatively painless, and then I’ll close with some basic backup strategies for Windows.

A Three Paragraph Primer on the Importance of Inspecting Your Dumps

By default, Windows 11 saves a small file that contains key debugging info from your memory when your computer blue screens, called a minidump. To inspect your minidump, you’ll need to grab WinDbg from the Microsoft Store, and then double-click the dmp files you find in c:/Windows/Minidump. The dumps include a time/date stamp in the file name, so you can use that to know which dumps are relevant to your current problems.

When WinDbg opens, you’ll see an analyze -v link in the Command pane. If you click that, the app will scan the dump and you can pull out some key info. The two most important bits of information for our purposes are the type of bluescreen and the software which caused the bluescreen. The type of bluescreen is in the first line under the big “Bugcheck Analysis” block and the offending software can be found by searching for “Process_Name”. You can hit ctrl+f to search through the wall of text in the command pane to dig out these nuggets.

Once you get that info, you have what you need to effectively diagnose your problem. If you have multiple bluescreens and you’re seeing the same kind of error in the same software consistently, it’s probably a problem with that software. You can solve it by reinstalling that software or driver or whatever the offending application is. Unfortunately for me, I was seeing different bluescreens in different applications, which was indicative of a larger problem with Windows.

The Reinstall and My Two-Disk Strategy

So now I’m faced with a reinstall. I suspected that this was coming, so I made a fresh image of my c: drive earlier in the day (more on that in a moment), and was prepared. I rebooted my PC with my Windows 11 24H2-equipped Ventoy thumbdrive in the USB port and kicked off the install process.

As an aside, if you regularly install multiple operating systems, Ventoy is the bomb. You make a specially formatted USB thumbdrive and it automatically scans a partition on that drive for bootable ISO files, which it lets you choose between them in an easy-to-use menu when you boot off of the drive. It’s turned my sack of OS install USB thumbdrives into a single drive that I can use to install different versions of Windows and different flavors of Linux. Highly receommended.

After deleting my Windows partitions (and leaving my Linux partition intact), I let Windows run its reinstall process. I use a mostly stock Windows install, the only thing I do is bypass the online account requirement during install, because I don’t want my Windows profile folders stored in OneDrive. You can do that by pressing Shift + F10 when the installer prompts you to connect to the Internet, then typing ‘start ms-cxh:localonly’ at that prompt, and following the instructions to create a local account. (For this to work, it’s vital that your old account and new account be the same because Windows creates your user profile folders based on this path. Once Windows boots up, you can safely connect your local user account to a Microsoft account without invoking OneDrive, if you want.)

While Windows was installing, I fired up my laptop and downloaded drivers for my hardware, installers for the applications I use most frequently, and the other assorted crap I install on my PC. I could have used WinGet or Chocolatey or another Windows package manger to gin up a quick script that automates installing this stuff, but clicking the installers is relatively easy and fast enough for infrequent, one-off installs. If I was unfortunate enough to reinstall Windows all the time, it might be worth automating the process more.

Once the Windows install is done, my two-disk strategy comes into play. I keep all my work on a separate SSD from c: drive, so my post install process was simple. First, I installed drivers for my hardware (chipset, graphics card, and other assorted motherboard stuff like network, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Thunderbolt, etc), run Windows Update, and reinstall my applications, making sure to reboot as instructed throughout the process. I also went into my folder view options in Explorer and turned on “Show hidden files, folders, and drives.”

Then, I rebooted the PC and immediately closed all the applications I’d just installed, including the stuff hidden in my system tray. I mounted my backup image of my old c: drive using Disk Management > Action > Attach VHD and assigned it a drive letter. Once I mounted that image, I was able to copy my entire profile folder over from the old image into my new profile directory, replacing files with reckless abandon. That’s c:/Users/<yourusername> It’s important to note that this only really works if the path to your user folder is the same on both your old install and new install and if you really don’t have anything running when you do this.

The copy just took a few minutes, thanks to the speedy external SSD I saved the backup on. After it finished, I rebooted the PC again and was back in business. While I’ll undoubtedly find things I need to do over the next few weeks—like removing search results from the Start Menu—the core applications and utilities I use on the day-to-day were all back up and running, in just under two hours.

This works because most applications store their configuration info in one of the subfolders of the c:/Users/<username>/AppData folder. When you copy your old profile folder over, your apps will find your old settings where they expect to be, and since I save all of my work files on my d: drive, the old work is where apps expect it to be when I fire them up.

Backing Up and You

The backup situation on modern Windows is, frankly, grim. With robust backup solutions that will use existing hardware built into OSX and readily available on Linux, the fact that Microsoft’s backup solution is exclusive “Use our cloud-based OneDrive solution and also give us money please” leaves a lot of users in the lurch. While OneDrive is great for backing up lightly-used PCs that are mostly glorified web browsers, I don’t think it’s sufficient for people who use their PCs for more than that. Anything that uses a large amount of space—gaming, photo and video creation, audio editing, or programming—will fill your available OneDrive space too quickly. So what’s the right local backup solution for Windows users?

This is where the classic Windows 7 Backup and Restore tool comes into play. It regularly backs up my important data to a NAS in my garage, but you could just as easily use these same tools with an external hard drive or SSD. (I also use Windows File History on some machines, as it’s a fast/easy backup that’s reasonably well supported in Windows 11. We discussed it in detail in a Tech Pod episode last month, but I can go into it in a future newsletter if folks want. Reply to this email or post a comment!)

Microsoft hides the Backup and Restore tool deep in the legacy Control Panel. To find it, type “Control Panel” in the Start Menu and go to System and Security > Backup and Restore (Windows 7). Select “Set up backup”, and follow the prompts until it asks you ‘What do you want to back up?’ You should choose ‘Let me choose’ and then make sure that under Computer the drives you want to backup are selected as is the check box labeled “Include a system image of drives…” at the bottom of the pane. I typically uncheck the two options under Data Files, since the drive backups will cover them as well. Hit next, and let the backup run. Depending on the size of your drives and the speed of the drive you’re backing up to, it might take a while.

To restore using this backup, you need to reinstall Windows 11, then open the Backup and Restore tool and walk through the Restore process. I’ve had mixed results trying to do a complete system restore using this process, but it’s fabulous as a way to cherry pick just the files you need and/or keep an image of an old install around just in case you discover you missed something important six months down the line. You can always mount that backup image, dig into your old file system, and restore whatever you missed.

What’s Next?

So I’m generally back in business, and happily running a crisp, new Windows install. Fixing this in a relatively short period of time feels really good too. Understanding how your computers work and how to fix them is an important way to fight enshittification. If the solution to every problem is just “yo, just buy a new one” that’s not great for anyone but the people selling the new one. It just strikes me as funny that I’m here again, writing about how to reinstall Windows, because that was one of the first cover features I wrote at the start of my tenure at Maximum PC.

If you’re looking for more great newsletters, I’ve really been enjoying my friend Patrick Klepek’s Crossplay newsletter. Partly because the topic is immediately relevant—navigating the intersection of parenting and games is challenging in a world where there’s enormous peer pressure pushing your kids toward predatory services like Roblox—but mostly I really missed reading Patrick’s writing about games.

Between being sick and my recent Windows misadventures have stalled out my time on Linux a bit. The Windows reinstall nuked my EFI partition and took out my boot manager. I’m planning to reinstall rEFInd on the EFI partition, so I’m sure I’ll talk about that next time.