Trying to recover a corrupt and damaged installation

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I have a friends computer that I am trying to get running again. It was originally a Win 7 machine and got the free upgrade. Several weeks back it got to the point that he could not run applications and he decided he wanted to go back to Win 7 so he got out the original DVD and tried to install 7. I am aware that he is beyond the 30 day go back window. Not being a computer guy he apparently screwed things up even worse. When I got the computer it would only boot into a recovery screen, but every recovery option I tried failed. Booted linux off a thumb drive and could read the hard drive, but could not find a users folder or any other data although he says he had backed up his data. So I wiped the drive and installed Win 7, but will not activate. I have a Win 10 DVD but have no idea what the keycode would be. What do I do now?

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…I have a Win 10 DVD but have no idea what the keycode would be…

If your Win10 DVD is any more than about a month old you’d be better off using the “Media Creation Tool” ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10 ) to create a new DVD or USB Thumbdrive.

I used the MCT to upgrade my 8GB USB Win10 install Thumbdrive last week when I needed to clean-install Win10 Pro on a customer’s laptop that had had the free upgrade from Win7 about April 2016 but it was stuck on a 1511 build and would not even attempt to upgrade to any of the 1607 (“AU”) builds. Soon after the clean-install Win10 upgraded itself again, after which winver reported “Version 1607 (OS Build 14393.447)”.

When you go to the MCT page in the above link look carefully at the instructions for “Using the tool to create installation media (USB flash drive, DVD or ISO file) to install Windows 10 on a different PC…”. You should be able to enter your friend’s Win7 Product Key to download the ISO.

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I used MCT two days ago before I posted to see if that would help, but it wants a keycode that I do not have and the win7 keycode from the back of the machine is not acceptable. Maybe I could start now with the upgrade and see if the keycode works. Just trying to find some answers before I start all over.

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If you can get Win 7 installed then you can try the free upgrade from https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/accessibility/windows10upgrade and then no key code will be required.

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Have you installed the manufacturer’s drivers? (That should happen first.)
If you reach out to Microsoft, and explain the situation, they should help you.

Image or Clone often! Backup, backup, backup, backup......
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