A neighbor asked me for help the other day. Her laptop had fallen to the ground and now only showing, what she described as a “blue screen”. As it turns out that blue screen was the BIOS. The harddrive, a conventional disk with rotating platters, clearly didn’t stand the fall.
I booted up the laptop with a Linux Mint live CD to check the status of the PC. Thankfully everything else seemed to be intact, except the HDD that was completely toasted. Disk was full of valuable pictures and now gone. Lesson learned the hard way. DO BACKUPS!
The task now was to bring the laptop back to a functional state and I went and bought a new SSD drive. A more robust alternative and MUCH faster.
There was no recovery CD’s as the old HDD had recovery on a partition. With that drive gone, I was worried how a new install of Windows would activate. Since this was a PC with Win8.1 I decided to give Windows 10 a try right away. Microsoft provides Windows 10 ISO from their website.
The install went quickly on the new SSD drive and everything was working again…. except the install was NOT activated. Since this PC had Win8.1 and upgrade to Win10 is free I decided to call Microsoft for help. After googling their phone number (for some time) I managed to talk to a MS representative in India (I think). I was basically asking for an activation code since a WIN10 license for this PC was free after all…. I know it was a long shot and unfortunately the person on the other end was not able to help me, other than explaining the obvious way, which required more work and resulted in the same goal.
So I had to wipe the new drive and install a Win8.1 ISO (again from MS website). I did not have any CD-KEY but nowadays that is stored in UEFI BIOS. Once finished that OS was activated automatically.
I then ran the Win10 ISO again for the second time and now Windows 10 was finally activated.
Lid closed.