Can I just wipe and merge Win10 partitions with GParted to install Windows 7?

[Barfo]

Ok so I installed Windows 10 on a new Samsung SSD, had a bad experience with it and I want to go back to Win 7.

The Win 7 installer sees 4 partitions on the disk and says it can't install on them. So, if I boot a GParted disk, nuke all the partitions and make a single NTFS one, will it work for installing Windows 7? will it damage the SSD or something?

 

[Bubbaleone]

Gparted, Windows Diskpart, Acronis, Paragon...any good disk editor can safely perform that task on an SSD. Disk operations on an SSD are no different than editing a HDD.

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[Dahak]

Or just delete all the partitions from the drive during the install of win7 so that it says unallocated and just select it and click next. Should not even need a 3rd party software

 

[Barfo]

Gparted, Windows Diskpart, Acronis, Paragon...any good disk editor can safely perform that task on an SSD. Disk operations on an SSD are no different than editing a HDD.

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Thanks, this is what I wanted to know

 

[Barfo]

Or just delete all the partitions from the drive during the install of win7 so that it says unallocated and just select it and click next. Should not even need a 3rd party software

For some reason it doesn't let me delete them.

 

[tidy]

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[Red Squirrel]

Yep just delete them all in gparted or any other program and should be good to go.

A dirty way if you're stuck but have access to a Linux command line is to dd the start of the drive. Ex: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda A few seconds is good enough as that location is pretty small, it will basically clear all the volume info, MBR, etc... I've seen situations where Windows does weird things to the MBR or something and deleting partitions is still not enough.