I have a friend's laptop in my office that has a bad HD (bad sectors). I'm running the long test with Seatools right now, but doubt it will be able to repair it to the point where I can clone it (Acronis and Macrium bot fail to image the drive).
The drive is 1 TB, but he's only using around 100 GB of it, including the hidden system partitions. I ordered and received a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO that I'll try to clone to after the long test is finished.
In the event that the old HD won't clone due to the errors, I'll have to do a new install to the SSD.
This is a Dell Inspiron M731R-5735. All is legit, but there is no COA label on the laptop. I'm not sure if it was originally win 8 or 8.1.
I was able to extract the product key from the drive using Nirsoft's utility.
So, all this is to ask if I need to follow a certain procedure to install and activate this machine?
I have a retail copy of Win 8 for one of my systems. I also have a win 8.1 .ESD and one I converted to .wim.
Can I use any of these to install his laptop, activating with his PK?
How should I proceed that will be the least problematic?
Thanks for any help.
The drive is 1 TB, but he's only using around 100 GB of it, including the hidden system partitions. I ordered and received a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO that I'll try to clone to after the long test is finished.
In the event that the old HD won't clone due to the errors, I'll have to do a new install to the SSD.
This is a Dell Inspiron M731R-5735. All is legit, but there is no COA label on the laptop. I'm not sure if it was originally win 8 or 8.1.
I was able to extract the product key from the drive using Nirsoft's utility.
So, all this is to ask if I need to follow a certain procedure to install and activate this machine?
I have a retail copy of Win 8 for one of my systems. I also have a win 8.1 .ESD and one I converted to .wim.
Can I use any of these to install his laptop, activating with his PK?
How should I proceed that will be the least problematic?
Thanks for any help.
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Win7, Win8