What is the safest and cleanest way you can start from scratch on a windows 10 desktop?

I guess you'd need to format the hdd before even installing windows ? Is it even possible to format an internal drive without windows 10 being installed ? Or that's pushing it too far ? Instal windows yourself, make a second user which would be your main user with no admin privileges, instal an antivirus like ESET immediately, with ublock Origin, but then even after all this, almost every application needs admin privileges to instal, you have no idea what it does, at least on Mac you have the illusion of safety since you only drag it to the folder, looks safer if you're a noob like me.

That's all I can think of, I'm kinda paranoid I know, please tell me if I forgot anything. I'm planning to build a pc in a couple of months and would love to get your input !

PS : I know that a normal user shouldn't worry that much, but I just want to know because I like to learn, and I thought this would be the best place to ask.

Solution 1:

The Windows 10 install menu, allows you to format a drive when you install Windows. It's also possible depending on the brand and model of motherboard to format a drive from UEFI/BIOS. If you want to format it a number of times to truly deep clean the drive than you can always use something like Boot and Nuke on a thumbdrive, you boot into that OS and it can format any drives it sees.