If I clone a failing hard disk using Macrium Reflect and install the new clone in the laptop, will it require a product key for Windows Activation? If so, what can I do if I don’t have a product key? Here’s the full story.
A few years ago I bought an old used Dell Latitude E6410 from a third-party vendor on Amazon for a nice low price. It came with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1, an Intel i5 processor (Arrandale), 4 GB of RAM, and MS Office 2013. I think maybe it had previously been used by a business and the computer shop re-worked it for consumer use. It was in great shape and worked perfectly for my husband’s general needs for browsing, email, and word processing. I kept it updated with Group A-style Windows Updates.
At the beginning of March of this year the system suddenly started giving a message that the hard drive was failing. Right away I copied the documents and pictures to an external hard drive (there wasn’t a lot of data, less than 1GB) and then made an image with Macrium Reflect (free). A little while later I bought a new WD HDD and used it to clone the hard drive with Macrium Reflect. My husband started using a Chromebook and stopped using this laptop.
I’m not a techie and have never replaced a hard drive, so I didn’t do anything with it right then, and other things in life took priority. Now, though, I’ve read some documentation and watched some YouTube videos, and I think it’s something I could do. As it is, the laptop is useless anyway, so I might as well try it. I’m retired, so I have a lot more time than money.
I haven’t tried switching out the hard drives yet, but I’m anticipating one problem. The COA sticker on the bottom of the laptop is for Vista, and of course there was no Windows 7 Ultimate Product Key included when I bought it, much less any installation disks. There’s also no “recovery drive” built in that you can use to make recovery disks as there is on many consumer PCs. So is there a way for me to activate Windows after I install the new hard drive?
Is there any difference between using the clone and restoring the image that I made? In other words, either way Windows is going to ask for an activation key, is that right? (The old disk is a Seagate with 500 GB and the new disk is a 750GB WD.)
I’ve read that you can activate Windows by phone after explaining that all you’ve done is replace the hard drive, but I don’t have a COA product key to give them. I do have a defunct hp laptop with a Windows 7 product key sticker, but it’s Home Premium rather than Ultimate, and I understand that the keys are specific to a Windows version.
On the one hand, the machine was updated through the January 2018 rollup, so I suppose I could just uninstall that update to roll back to December 2017 and then join Group W, I guess. Or I suppose we could leave the laptop unconnected to the Internet and just use it when he needs access to his documents – if Windows will allow using Office without activation. On the other hand, I’d prefer to have another online Windows 7 machine (along with my 2012-era hp laptop) as a “backup” computer, and for those few times when he needs something beyond a Chromebook. I’d also like to update it to June 2018, just to have the Meltdown/Spectre mitigations and whatever other security patches there were since December 2017.
The Dell with the failing hard drive still works (or did when I made the clone in March).
Any ideas or recommendations?
Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.1
Group A:
Win 10 Pro x64 v22H2 Ivy Bridge, dual boot with Linux
Win l0 Pro x64 v22H2 Haswell, dual boot with Linux
Win7 Pro x64 SP1 Haswell, 0patch Pro, dual boot with Linux,offline
Win7 Home Premium x64 SP1 Ivy Bridge, 0patch Pro,offline
