Reinstalling Windows 7 After Hard Drive Wipe - Product Key Incorrect?
Nov 12, 2010
I recently purchased a Dell Xps 1340 laptop that came with windows 7 32 bit professional. After a few months, I needed to wipe the hard disk, and so I did. Before I did, I extracted my product key with a program that I downloaded off the internet. I got the following information:
Windows 7 Professional
Product Part No.: X15-37377
Installed from 'OEM' media.
Product ID: ******* match to CD Key data
CD Key: *********
Computer Name: ***-PC
Registered Owner: ***
Registered Organization:
Anyway, I had a RETAIL windows 7 professional disc, and I installed this onto my dell laptop. However, it keeps telling me that my product key is wrong when I try to activate. I have tried both 32bit and 64bit? is it because I'm using a RETAIL windows 7 disc? If I try a dell oem disc, will that work with my product key?
I have a co-worker that brought in his Acer notebook. It is running Windows 7 loads but only will show the background. Nothing else will show. When trying to do a repair it locks up the repair every time. Does the same thing if I try to install Windows again.
I am trying to help a friend out with his Sony Vaio E Series Laptop. The computer had crashed and he tried to do a clean install of windows but it failed and nothing would respond. Even when you tired to do a clean install of windows again it just went to the light blue windows screen with the bird and nothing happened. So I used Dban to Wipe the hard drive clean and start over from scratch. After I wiped it I tried to reinstall windows and it says there are no signed device drivers found. So I checked the bios and it's not even registering the hard drive. I have been searching the boards everywhere to find a solution to this. The Bios does not allow for much change so I can not make sure it is set to a SATA connection and I have tried turning off the signed device option when starting up. Nothing is working.
If you overwrite a file and disable windows shadow copy (system restore) service, is there anyway to recover the overwrited files? I've heard of people recovering data from wiped hard drive disks. I'm need to know because I accidentally erased a text file that had all of my passwords stored on it...
i have a lg xnote that i got given to me because they didnt know what to do with it. when i turn it on it comes up as "harddisk security" and "primary master" and asks for a password that i dont have. i just want to wipe it or something?
I have an HP desktop running windows vista that will soon be passed on to me. If I buy an "Upgrade" version of windows 7, is there a way to completely and totally wipe out the hard drive and upgrade, or would I have to buy the more expensive "full install" version of 7?
I would like to completely wipe the hard drive of my Lenovo Thinkpad as the Best Buy geek squad really messed things up. I need to back up all of my data first and was wondering if there was any free options online? I have a 4GB jump drive I can use as well.As for wiping the laptops hard drive, what is the best way? Keep in mind that I want to have it completely restored to factory state. I don't want to do a simple reformat through a Windows 7 install
I am upgrading my Hard Drive to an SSD and I was going to do a Clean install of Windows 7 but for some reason I can not find my Windows 7 CD including the case. I have the product key since it is in my computer but I just don't have the disk, What I should do.
To understand my problem, you need to know a little about the history of my PC. i bought my PC last September and about a month later, everything failed for no particular reason, and my hard drives were wiped clean. Originally, my windows, (windows 7 64 bit), was installed on a hard drive with over 1 TB worth of space.when the problem was fixed, my windows was installed onto my SSD, which only has 20GB worth of space. This means that space was incredibly limited, meaning that i could barely do anything that i wanted to.After trying to reinstall windows onto my 1TB hard drive, it failed at the last possible minute, saying something like, windows cannot configure itself to run on your system. Which bring me here.
I just bought a new Hard drive and I installed windows 7 onto it, but whenever I put in my product key, it says the key is not valid. Does this mean I have to buy a brand new Windows 7 or is there a way around this?
I'm going to be reformatting my hard drive. However this time around I realized I might have a problem.
I originally purchased my pc with windows vista, but then when windows 7 came out I purchased it and immediately installed it on my computer. Bottom line, the factory image of my drive contains windows vista and my current operating system is windows 7.
So, If i go ahead and reformat my hard drive my system will revert back to windows vista (right?). I still have the windows 7 installation cds and the product key. So, can I just reformat and then just simply reinstall windows 7 with the cds and the product key? Or is it more complicated than that?
Would formating my hardrive and reinstalling Windows 7 speed up my laptop?Which way will be the best to do it? Do i create a partition not to lose all graphix and sounds software?
I mapped a few network drives to different shared folders on my EX485 with the inital 750GB drive installed. Since then, I have installed an additional 2x1TB. However, in Windows 7 it is showing 1.18TB free of 678GB, so it recognizes the correct free space, but is still showing the old HDD total. I've removed the mappings and readded and rebooted both my PC and WHS with no luck.
I have a Dell XPS 13 that came with Vista home. I later upgraded to Windows 7 home. The computer began to have intermittent lock up and video failures so I decided to wipe the drive and do a clean install of Windows 7. Now I can't activate windows 7. Since I upgraded this legitimently I should be able to reactivate my system.
You know, these previous days I haven't used my laptop because of some problems, I already posted my problem still waiting for the result and i'm really out of patience now.. So what's on my mind now is to reinstall the os or reformatting hard disk.. which is better can i choose reformatting the hard disk because it is faster than reinstalling windows? What will happen when i reformat the hard drive? will the system go back normal? i don't care now about my files since i have a backup what i want is to back my laptop in good state..
I am upgrading my OS from XP to Windows 7, but I am having problems cleaning my hard drive so I have 16GB of free space. My D drive is not NFTS formatted so I can not install on it. How can I safely wipe the C drive so I can complete my upgrade.
My C drive is showing that i have 1.6 GB of empty space. But when see the the contents by opening C drive and selecting everything and doing a space check i see only 86 GB of space taken up. My C partition is 100 GB and I have my page files are on a different drive. So pagefile.sys cannot be a problem, could it?
I am having a new problem with a 1 year old computer I built running Windows 7 64 bit.
I have two hard drives:
Solid State (Mainly just the OS on here)2nd hard drive with everything else on it.Windows is saying I have used 31.5 gb of space on the SSD.When I enable hidden folders/files and select everything on the drive, it is only coming up with 21.5gb used.I DO NOT have system restore enabled.I DO NOT have Windows backup enabled.Honestly have no clue what is causing this 10gb or so of space to be unaccounted for but I know it wasn't always like this
I have windows 7 ultimate 64 bit installed on my laptop. My problem is that my c drive shows 26 GB used space. However, if i go inside c drive and check properties of all folders including hidden files and protected operating system files, the total comes up to 29.1 GB. I have deleted all restore points and have system restore enabled only on c drive. I have allocated 3 GB on c drive for system restore points.......
I have an HP desktop computer that I just bought an SSD for. I made the "recovery media" disks, I'm assuming that's the OS backed up? I want to make the SSD my boot drive. I put in the disks and unplugged the HDD and plugged in the SSD and I'm at a screen called "Recovery Manager". Do I do the "factory reset" to install the OS on this SSD?
So I can't change the drive letter. Do I need to use Partition Magic again? The more I keep hearing/reading "do you have a backup?" - makes me believe the tool (OS) isn't capable of handling/accessing the data properly.
I have a Sony Viao which does not have a disc drive and came with Windows 7 ready installed (installation was done automatically along side the process of starting computer up for first time after purchase). I cannot remember my administrator password which in itself has caused many problems; to get around this, I think I need to re-install windows - but to do this as a function on the computer (i.e. through the 'recovery' option on 'Assist' button/function) I must access it as an administrator. I think I need to reinstall manually through command prompt, can anyone tell me how to do this? Or do they have any additional advice?
I don't have a Windows 7 disc (I've seen the 'creating a bootable USB installer' videos etc, but these seem to require a disc with windows on from which the USB is made, which I don't have!) Hence I think I need to go through command prompt...
My computer literacy is not very good and I am, to be honest, at a loss of how else to get around this problem(and I would rather not spend a massive amount of money I don't have sending it to a PC shop, if i can help it)...the computer itself is not old (it was brought in August 2011) and already once or twice there had been an issue with Windows were an error occured and it appeared to 'forget' windows existed (box appears saying "operating system not found..."), I switched it to 'safe mode' and restarted it and the problem appeared to correct itself but...
Please help! The problem is fairly urgent! I am also worried that it has a virus as I haven't been able to install new anti-virus software (requires admin password for installs etc) and hence I would like to correct the underlying problem of having no administrative authority to correct other problems asap!
I keep all my data on a separate drive. The last time I re-installed windows 7 I had to take ownership of all my data even though the user name on the old install and then new install was the same. After reading the forums I understood that the SID for my user name was different between the old and new installations.
So my questions are
1) Is there anyway to assign the old user SID to the user created in the newly reinstalled OS so that I don't have to take ownership for a huge number of files/folders recursively?
2) If there is no way to assign the SID how do people store their data to allow for easy reinstall of the OS/Migration to a different computer?
I have a hard drive I want to backup to a 64gb flash drive and then restore it to another different hard drive than where it came from. I have windows 7 and office on my laptop and I want it on my desktop pc. There isn't close to 64gb of info on my laptop so it should be fine even though the hard drive says I have 160gb. It is all free space except for those programs.
