Hello everyone, to start, this is a bit of Windows Linux question but Im posting it on the Linux sub forum because its the one I need the most help with. I've recently went from Windows 8 to 8.1 but have realized that windows 8.1 is not worth it to me so I want to go back to windows 8. The problem is the only way to go back is with a fresh install of windows 8 which I can easily due but I need to delete my windows 8.1 partitions on my SSD. At the moment its my only drive so I want to know if can load GParted Live onto a usb with an iso using Unebootin and from there delete my Windows partitions so windows 8.1 wont be preventing from installing windows 8.
There is GParted live, but it can be a bit intimidating since you have to do some manual configuration upon every boot (see steps 3 - 6 here for more info). You can also load most any live distro of linux and it will have GParted. If you are using a Debian-based distro (like Ubuntu) and it doesn't have GParted for some reason, you can install it through the terminal with sudo apt-get install gparted
Here are instructions for installing GParted Live via Windows/Unetbootin: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php#windows-method-c
Im having trouble mounting because I think theres issues with the video drivers but Im decided to create a second partition an installing windows 8 then deleting my windows 8.1 partition and hopefully that will work because if not its a 30 minute drive to my friends house to use his computer for a second boot os to format my ssd from.
You could also try Parted magic on the Ultimate Boot CD it works great and you should be Secure Erasing the Drive anyways if you are going to install a new OS to it. Once you make the Ultimate Boot CD into a USB bootable disk with UNetBootin or something similar (dd) you can boot it and select parted magic. Once that boots you can select erase drive and then chose Secure Erase, it may ask you to sleep your computer to unfreeze the drive but once you do you can run Secure Erase again with no problems this time. It will take anywhere from a couple seconds to a minute but once it finishes you should be all set with a factory fresh drive.
You could also DD the drive for a bit but it's not good for the SSD
a windows 8 iso has a partition manager built in, there's nothing in 8.1 preventing this
My guess is you computer is using UEFI with that windows 8 partition manager. You may need to go into bios and enable Legacy Boot and then boot to usb. Some newer computers have secure boot enable in the bios as well and switch off Legacy, this will also need to be disabled. You will need to enable it back to get back to windows depending on how you set up your partitions ie GPT/MBR.