Back to Win10 after HDD failure -- how does MS handle?

[kisk]

Quick question as I reinstall the original 8.1 on this HP 14z-n200.

Owner had upgraded to Win10 and loves it (heh, good for her) -- only uses it on the road. HDD has failed and she wanted to go ahead and upgrade to an SSD. Original OS is 8.1 but we're curious if we'll still be able to get back to 10 with this new drive. Installation ID is of course a algorithmic calculation of all her hardware.. after reinstalling 8.1 on this new SSD will we be able to use her eligibility to upgrade this to 10? Surely MS logs other IDs (bios/mb/etc serials) and sees that this was simply a HDD swap.

Could I simply have just done a 10 install/activation?

Unfortunately a successful 1:1 clone wasn't possible but we retrieved at least what she wanted. Have decent hives if needed.

Thanks!

 

[Porthos]

Could I simply have just done a 10 install/activation?

Clean install 10 and it will activate when it goes online.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Once a system has had Windows 10 installed on it you can install it directly for the life of the motherboard. IE. shut up and just install it, skip any prompts for keys and let it get online. It will activate, no problem, today or 5 years from now.

 

[cypress]

Yeah what they said! Lol. Seriously though save yourself the hassle of trying to do an upgrade from 8.1 to 10. The work has already been done before.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Exactly. This has worked for me on systems that upgraded from 7 to. Just use the Windows 10 media creation tool to create a Windows 10 usb installer, clean install 10. As soon as it goes online their server should recognize it and it should activate.

 

[kisk]

Ok well that was a nightmare. Sorry just now getting around to posting a resolution. Apparently I was using an older Win10 image (1511) that I had downloaded previously. This machine absolutely would not activate and would say that my bios key was not valid for this edition of 10.

Called MS.. omg what a huge waste of an hour on the phone. I was transfered over to 4 different people, none of which knew what the hell they were talking about. Each time I had to read the key from the bios it to them it took 10-15 minutes as they can't speak english. Even alpha, bravo talk was a nightmare.. after an hour they wanted to remote in and I just hung up.

Solution: Created a new USB with the latest media creation tool and it activated immediately. Apparently older versions of the 10 install will not activate a Win8 RTM key.

 

[Porthos]

Created a new USB with the latest media creation tool

Don't bother with the tool. You can get any ISO you will ever need with this tool.

https://www.heidoc.net/joomla/techn...icrosoft-windows-and-office-iso-download-tool

 

[DMC Unlimited]

Don't bother with the tool. You can get any ISO you will ever need with this tool.

https://www.heidoc.net/joomla/techn...icrosoft-windows-and-office-iso-download-tool

Where has this been all my life?

 

[Porthos]

Where has this been all my life?

Suggest you stock up on anything you think you will ever need. It can stop working at any time.

 

[DMC Unlimited]

Suggest you stock up on anything you think you will ever need. It can stop working at any time.

Yeah, we're pretty well stocked now on our ISOs, but this would have made life a lot easier! ;-)