Solved Win 8.1 lost after clone. Recovery drive not working. HELP

[Fraz]

Hey guys, much appreciation to anyone who can give some advice as I'm having an absolute nightmare here. I recently installed an SSD into my Lenovo K430. I used Easus TODO to clone the drive, which seemed to work fine. I changed the BIOS boot sequence and booted into the SSD - all still seemed well at this point, so as a final step I formatted my old HDD to use as file storage. This is where it all went wrong! I don't know if I actually hadn't booted into the SSD and was still looking at my OS on the HDD, but basically I've gone and deleted Windows, including the recovery partition and everything else. The old HDD is reformatted, the new SSD won't load Windows.

I made a recovery drive before cloning, however this doesn't seem to work. I can get to the screen where I have options to reset the computer etc, but after it has "reset", all I can do is choose a country and keyboard layout before seeing an error message:
[h=1]"Windows could not complete the installation. To install Windows on this computer, restart the installation."[/h]Trying to find my windows product key so I can make a disc from windows 8 download, but can't find it anywhere - all suggestions online say that I should use software to get it from the BIOS, but I obviously can't do that when I can't get the thing started.

Please help! Stressed out of my mind here. Many thanks to anyone who can give some advice.

 

[genet]

Trying to find my windows product key so I can make a disc from windows 8 download, but can't find it anywhere - all suggestions online say that I should use software to get it from the BIOS, but I obviously can't do that when I can't get the thing started.

Look at this post for info: How to clean install Windows 8.1 if you have an OEM computer with UEFI firmware (BIOS) embedded Windows 8 product key?

But if you have an OEM computer with UEFI firmware (BIOS) embedded Windows 8.1 product key, the Windows 8.1 installer (when you install Windows 8.1 from DVD/USB) will detect the product key from UEFI firmware (BIOS) and activate Windows 8.1 automatically.

 

[Fraz]

Thanks for that, but I can't download the ISO image without a product key. The generic keys in that post don't work. Is there a way to get the key from CMD?

EDIT: I see there is a command line in the post. Can't get it to work though - do I just type it as it's written? I get an error message when I type it character for character... "not recognised as an internal or external command"

 

[Fraz]

Given up and ordered the recovery discs from Lenovo. Thanks anyway genet.