Hard Drive Issue

Hello mate now can you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by wiping the drive? Plus the install just what did you install from?

The big mistake really lik e many others is that you tried 10 and in my mind it wrecks any attempt at getting back to 7 properly as we have many who are in your situation posting here.

Now I personally wipe a drive before I reinstall to make absolutely sure that any trace of a previous install is erased - formatting is not guarantee that that happens. Now you can do two things one is to try yet another reinstall or wipe the the drive first and reinstall .

See this for a no nonsense drive clean Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command < you can just use the clean it is much quicker or use the clean all which is much more thorough but takes longer.

Your install media I personally do not like installing from a stick I prefer a DVD but that is your choice my only concern is when you are making the media how you are copying the ISO file to the dsik or stick as it is better to burn it as slow as you can to prevent corruption of the finished bootable media.

I use these two Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command or this PowerISO - Create, Burn, Mount, Edit, Compress, Encrypt, Split, Extract ISO file, ISO/BIN converter, Virtual Drive, DAA File the PowerISO is easier to use and you can set the burn rate to a very low rate the fastest you should burn is at 4x in any case.
If you go for PowerISO then watch for the add ons that come with it don't be tempted into downloading any of them.

1. Do a diskpart cleanall. Only cleanall completely wipes the drive writing zeroes to each and every sector of the HDD. Because of this it shall take a longtime to finish depending upon the size of the HDD..( Diskpart clean only writes zeroes to the first 2047 sectors of the drive and a few last sectors in the drive leaving the rest as it was.It is a "convenience wipe" that will finish quicker in seconds rather than a "full wipe" In your case a "full wipe" to restore it to factory condition is recommended and hence diskpart cleanall only.)

2. I would think it wouldn't make any difference whether you write to the DVD or pendrive. Use Rufus to write the ISO to a pendrive. https://rufus.akeo.ie/ If you are a paranoid - like me - suspecting your pen drive , put a checkmark against 'Check Device for Bad blocks" and remove the check mark against "Quick Format" to do a full format to eliminate bad sectors. Of course you have to backup any data on the pendrive since all data in it will be lost when Rufus formats the pendrive before writing the ISO. Rufus itself will warn you before formatting.

Before doing the Diskpart cleanall (which could take many hours depending on your hdd) that's being suggested, I would first go into your BIOS and make sure the boot order is set to boot from the disk you just installed the OS on. It could be that the system is somehow trying to boot from a different disk. For instance, if you have a non-bootable USB drive plugged in and the boot order is set to boot from the USB, you could get that error message.

I can't think of what the Windows updates are doing to cause your issue but you may want to create a restore point (or even a complete system image) of your system before allowing Windows to update.

Yes it does mate and I find best started before one goes to bed and leave it overnight. Spinners take longer of course than SSD's. When it is done at least you can install without concern.

Just remember if you don't want that 10 crap then do those links I sent you first up including making your updates settings as in my pic.