Hmmm, headsratching a bit here but there has to be a way to do it. I've got a laptop here with a dead HDD. The lappy originally came with windows 7 and was upgraded to windows 10 during the free upgrade stage. Now that the hdd drive has died I'm not sure how to go about reinstalling windows 10 again.
Any ideas?
Yeah, there is no need for you to activate manually. Just install, connect to the internet, and it'll self authenticate with MS servers (they do this by comparing a checksum of your hardware when it was first upgraded).
Seems like a job for google, looks like if you login to your MS account it should hopefully get the license from there.
See whether you can go grab the win10 install online and do the USB install.
My first thought was however was that if you have the original win7 install, you can still go via the win10 upgrade for assistive technology users.
Of course there's also shady stuff that we won't go into
Am I missing something here? I've upgraded a few laptops/PC's via the normal tool and it's never asked me to pay or anything?
A bit strange considering the "free" upgrade supposedly ended July last year…
If it is the same PC (Mobo + CPU) then you can just reinstall Windows 10 and it should activate itself after checking that your hardware profile matches the one stored with Microsoft.
If it dosn't automatically, then just call the Microsoft activation centre and get them to reactivate it, which is a pretty painless process.
Just make sure its the same version of Win10 that you had before (ie. home or pro)
IT problems solved in 30 mins or less. Go OZBargain IT support team :)
this is worth reading since the problem here was solved: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/5htbt…
Awesome, thanks guys. :)
Looks like several options there.
Since your laptop was upgraded to Windows 10 during the free upgrade stage, it should still get the upgrade for free when you re-install it from here since Microsoft registers machine ID.
and if the media creation tool does not work for you, then you can always do this/not piracy