Solved What should I save prior to clean install?

I seem to be overwhelmed with comments, but that is good. What I did was to move as much files as I could remember to another HDD. I then went into UEFI and selected to boot from usb. What I did next was troublesome for a while. I started the windows install and when it came to the drive I wanted to install on, it said that it was GPT and I could not install on it. So, after much research, I went into bios again and change it to UEFI only. Install started up fine. I got past all of the obstacles such as OneDrive and the others with no issues. When Install was all set and done, I did not have Windows 11 installed on my PC, but had Windows 10 Pro instead (?). I have no idea why. Prior to the install I had deleted or removed the smaller partitions that had reserve and recovery on them. I figured that Windows would create these partitions during install.

So, I created another bootable USB drive with Windows 11 on it. I will try again in a few minutes.

When I do a clean install of Windows on a previously used drive, I delete all the partitions on the drive, and let the Windows installer create the ones it needs.

With Windows 11, that includes a 100MB Fat32 UEFI boot partition.

There may be better ways to proceed, but that approach is reliable. Especially for non-experts like me.

Just finished the new clean install of Windows 11. So far, so good.

Mark Phelps said:

If you use online sites, then you need to save the login/password info for each site -- and HOW to do that varies greatly with each of the browsers used. You need to Google for the browsers you use to find out how to save and restore that information.

Click to expand...

This can be saved by pen and paper or on notepad doc. To external backup drive for better security

I do keep my all of my userid's and passwords on an excel spreadsheet on another drive separate from c:\. There are far too many for me to remember and to write on a sheet of paper. This way I can update or change passwords.

So far, windows 11 pro is working fine. I did have an issue with my McAfee antivirus, but had it resolved by chatting with them. Other than that, I am tweaking my desktop so that it works smoother. And I am also slowly bringing back the programs that I had before. Thanks again to all of you!