Setup Installation :: Install Windows 8 On Dead Vista Laptop
Jan 28, 2013
My Vista running laptop recently died. It boots as far as the screen saying it didn't boot properly last time and suggesting I boot into Safe Mode etc. Whatever I chose it doesn't work. I can boot into Ubuntu via USB disc so I know the laptop is fine.
My laptop has a genuine Vista license key but I don't have any install or recovery discs. Is there any way I can install Windows 8 using the upgrade license while it is still cheap?
Is this possible? I have a code and I've just been researching/trying to work out how to do this for the past few days with no real success. As far as I'm aware I could make my own bootable USB/disk but the windows 8.1 updater doesn't work on Vista. I thought I could maybe make the USB with my brother's PC which runs 8.1 but the program asks for the code and I'm not sure whether that would lock that code to his PC or not.
Failing that I thought I could maybe download the iso (I think that's what it's called) and make the USB without the official windows 8.1 program though I'm not sure of that either.
I have been given a dell inspiron 531 with 64 bit AMD processor, running 32 bit vista home basic, that has responded well to RAM upgrade to 4GB.
I want to install 64 bit win 8 pro media centre which I have on an original MS CD. either over current vista or on separate partition as dual boot.
For some reason the dell wont read the MS win 8 64 disk (or any other original MS OS disks I have (vista-32/7-64/8-32)) but reads pretty much everything else (DVD's excepted as currently has no DVD reading software.)..either through explorer or during boot..it is not only original ms discs that are a problem as dell won't read Windows 8-64 enterprise trial iso I burned myself either.
I have tried turning off security software (MS security essentials/MS firewall)..no change.
CD's all read fine via explorer on my lightly hopped up HP tx1340ea running win 8-64 pro media centre.
I have a Lenovo B575 laptop that is not UEFI capable; however, I have downloaded the x64 Win 8.1 ISO, burned it to a bootable DVD and a bootable USB drive and tried installing Windows 8.1 using a boot from DVD and also a boot from USB drive, and neither method has resulted in a successful installation. The root cause of the installation problem is that Windows 8.1 is intent on creating an EFI partition structure on my non-UEFI machine.
So, I end up with a 300MB Recovery Partition and a 100MB EFI Partition which doesn't work well on my machine. Now, during the installation process, I opted to delete all existing partitions and allow the installation to properly partition the hard drive for installation; however, I knew I was in trouble when the machine started hanging during reboots.
i have just purchased a new Compaq laptop, Notebook G as i'm aware of the title but unsure, though with the initial setup of the laptop it asks a few questions ie: name, location and login details for Windows, though i get an error message stating that "Windows 8 could not be installed on this device, please try again" or something of the sort.
after a few attempts i have given up.
it appears that it is faulty, though, it is difficult for me to get into a store and request an exchange, is this common?
I have a windows 8 partition and vista partition. I want to uninstall VISTA, how do I do this? Do I set windows 8 as my active partition and just delete VISTA partition under disk management?
Its a HP Envy laptop with a 1TB HDD running on windows 8. But the laptop has been having a lot of start-up errors and finally some files corrupted and windows wouldn't function properly. So I decided to reformat it to 8.1, a complete wipe to get rid of all the pre-installed HP crap.
So here's what I've tried, in the same order.
> I tried to install windows 8.1 through windows 8. -It failed after it restarted- > I tried to install windows 8.1 through USB ontop of the Windows Partition (There were 5 partitions). -It failed because of a GPT (If I remember correctly) Partition error- > I decided to delete all the partition and install Windows 8.1 ontop the entire 1TB disk space. -It started installing but then failed with an error code 0x80070057- > I tried diskpart through CMD to clean the disk drive then followed with a format to ntfs -It always just sticks on 0 percent%- > I tried all the same steps with Windows 7 -The exact same errors happen-
I've got one last option, plug the HDD into my desktop and try to format it that way but this is a lot of work so I'd like to keep it as a last resort.
I bought a toshiba satellite with a preinstalled win 8.1. I formatted all that partitioned caos and installed my beloved well known Win 7. Now I have installed win 8.1 again via recovery discs, in order to have a dual boot. Is there a way to install the last image that I created of C:/Win 7 in a new partition? When I try to install it the only chance that seems to be is that of replacing C:/win 8.1. Software, change of Drive letters (how?).
I have a Dell Inspiron 15R SE 7520 laptop that came with Windows 8 Core edition pre-installed. This laptop has never worked properly for some reason. It won't shutdown the normal way (it'll just stay on the shutdown screen forever) and it never comes back from sleep without a BSOD along with other troubles that haven't been solved by updating drivers,etc.
I decided I want to do a clean Windows 8.1 re-install and upgrade on my laptop to get rid of these problems, but it's been ages since I last did this (back in Win2K times, I used to dual boot Slackware Linux) and I've bee reading about all this UEFI, Secure Boot,etc and quite frankly it's making me quite nervous. I was even planning on taking this chance to dual boot some linux distro, but it looks sooo difficult. Things are much more complicated these days for the tinkerer!
I need to make sure I can get back to a running system quickly.
For starters, here is how the hard drive is partitioned: [URL] .... And this is the Diskpart output : [URL] ....
Why do I have 5 partitions? I understand the recovery partition, the OS partition and (after lots of reading) the ESP partition, but I'm not sure about the others. What do I need to keep? I've been reading around and I see some people recommend wiping the whole drive and starting from scratch. Is this a good ide?
I'll create the installation media from a windows 8.1 MSDN ISO using a USB drive. When I start the installation process it will ask me where I want to reinstall it to. Do I just choose the OS partition? Won't the recovery partition be based on a Windows 8 image and be useless from now on?
What's the best way I can get back to a fully working system in case I screw up somehow? I've made an image of my drive using Macrium Reflect free edition. But I read here that I cannot make an image of a GPT disk. Will this image I made work for getting back to a working system quickly in case I screw up?
As a last resort, I've made a Recovery USB using the Dell Backup and Recovery Method. In the extreme case that I screw up real bad, will this work to get back a factory-state system even if I've wiped my hard drive clean? I'm assuming this tool is for users recovering after a dead hard drive so it should work , right?
I bought my wife a new VAIO Sony laptop. It came with Windows 8 installed. She has been using a Toshiba laptop with Win7. She wants no part of Windows 8. (She is 84 years old) & spends a lot of time on her laptop.
I want to put Win7 on the Sony VAIO. I don't want to save anything on it. I want to make a Clean install by reformatting the HD. However, I know you can not completely reformat the HD because of the "System Reserved" partition. How to do a factory reformat?
I have a Windows 8 / Vista dual boot - Windows 8 on SSD on C: and Vista on HDD on D: (data only on E: ) I have not used Vista since installing Windows 8 and now want to remove to free up some space and remove dual boot
Is there an option to keep my files on the drive but simply remove the Vista OS folder and remove the dual boot option? Or do I need to follow process here and "delete volume" and then copy all the files across again from backup?
If I do need to "delete volume" my first issue is that this option is greyed out and cannot be selected for D: drive? How can I sort this? also what do I do with 11GB recovery partition and 3.54GB OEM partition?
I understand all I need to do is install and it will pickup serial from bios and be activated
I found a windows 8 pro dvd but it did not activate maybe because laptop came with basic. I want to activate it without an activator as its not my laptop, and it did come with windows 8 genuine on it. I notice all the links here are dead and all the torrent are for other than basic windows 8.
i have acer aspire v3-571g laptop with windows 8.1 x64 based OS. Processor is Intel Core i5.
To get a faster booting, i selected 2 processor instead of 1 in advanced boot option (msconfig) by mistake and now my laptop become dead slow on booting and startup.
My Windows 8 is corrupted on my VAIO Sony Laptop, so I tried to install Ubuntu-12.04.2 to access my data. I didn't get very far, however, because after I selected to boot from 'internal optical drive' and 'enabled' for 'secure boot' in the UEFI, and put the Ubuntu CD in, the screen went black. Now, I can't get it to switch on again at all nor can I get the CD out of the drive. When I press the 'assist' button to boot through UEFI or the power button to boot normally, the power and battery lights illuminate for the amount of time I'm holding either button down but nothing else happens. It's a new laptop - model SVE151G13M - that I bought in Germany very recently but can't get fixed under warranty because I'm currently in South Africa and the warranty is not valid here.
I recently killed my windows 7 laptop (I don't want to talk about it). I pulled the hard drive and set it up as an external drive, so I can see all the files through my new windows 8 laptop. I downloaded and installed windows live mail 2012 on the new laptop, tracked down all my email files and manually transferred them over -- that worked like a charm. Transferring the contacts is not so easy, though.
The contact file appears to be "contacts.edb," but it's a hidden file. Even when I check the appropriate box to show hidden files, it still won't show. And if I search for the file, it doesn't show. BUT, if I search for the folder "DBStore" then the file "dbstore.ini" shows up, and when I select "open file location" the hidden files are visible in that folder, including "contacts.edb." Still with me?
I can't open the old live mail program to export this file -- I can drag it into the appropriate folder on the new laptop, but windows live 2012 pretends like it's not there. I've downloaded 3 different format conversion programs to convert an edb file to pst or csv or whatever, but none of them have worked. So, the only other thing I can think of is trying to get live email 2012 to look directly at the old file in it's old spot on the old hard drive, but I don't know if that's possible.
I just got a new laptop, a Lenovo X230, for which I paid extra to have the OS on it as Windows 8 Pro.
So--now I have it, and Win 8 Pro 64 is installed and activated on it. I am a legal owner of Win 8 Pro.
However, I would like to do a clean install of Win 8 on the computer, to have it free of bloatware, etc. (In fact, I would like to set up a multi-boot with Win 7, and perhaps even triple boot with Xp as well. (I have installation media and my product keys for XP and 7 though, so those are not really a problem.)
The computer came with no discs at all. There is a procedure to make recovery disks. I may do that, but I think those will be to restore the computer to how it came from the factory, and therefore not usable for a clean install.
I don't see my product key for Win 8 anywhere. Not on the computer, not on any kind of card that came with it, etc.
I looked at the tutorial here for clean install of Windows 8, but it requires an install disc and product key. I have neither, although I am a legal owner of Windows 8.
Is there a way I can create (from my installed Windows 8) a win 8 install disk, that can be used for a clean install? Or a link to download one? Is there a way I can get my product key?
I am trying to upgrade from windows 8 pro to windows 8.1 on a samsung laptop. The download completes and installation starts.
After a while the following message appears "you cant install windows on a usb flash drive with setup"
I am not actually trying to install to a flash drive. I contacted Microsoft and after 5 hours they said that I should connect to the internet with a cable and not by wireless in order to solve the problem (this didn't work of course and I had told them that it was an install problem and not a download problem).
Until very recently i was running Windows 8 with a 240 GB Sandisk SSD as a primary and a 2 TB Western Digital Green HDD as a storage. I decided to set up a RAID 1 setup so i purchased a second 2 TB HDD and installed it.
My intent was to run windows 8 off the 240 SSD as a primary and have a RAID 1 setup for my 2TB HDDs.
I learnt that my data configuration was set to AHCI. I decided to do a complete clean install and change the sata configuration in BIOS to RAID.
After successfully creating a RAID volume using my 2TB HDDs i proceeded to install Windows off my primary. I am however having difficulties in that it will not allow me to install windows on either drive.
My model is HP Pavilion Slimline s3760in Desktop PC
HP Pavilion Slimline s3760in Desktop PC Product Specifications -- In product specifications you can notice that my OS was shipped with Windows Vista Home Premium with Windows Media Center (32-bit) with Vista Service Pack 1
In NVidia website it has mentioned that all the oem model should download from manufacture like hp, dell website only.
IF you check driver update for this model for windows vista 32bit you will notice original driver like keyboard, nvidia, etc.
Driver - Original (5) Original Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1200 TV Tuner Driver 2008-11-18 , Version1.31.26252.0, 5.87M Original driver for the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1200 TV tuner solutions. Original HP Multimedia Keyboard Driver 2008-11-14 , Version1.0.7.1, 6.09M Original driver for the HP multimedia keyboard solutions.
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So my queries is that i have recently installed windows 8.1 and i wanted these original files to be installed but dont know which one to pick from vista drivers or windows 7 drivers? but windows 7 drivers are latest when compare with vista. Or should I download nvidia drivers from nvidia website? and also same goes with realtek audio driver from realtek website?
My laptop originally had Windows 8 installed on it on an SSD and an HDD. I have since wiped the drive clean. But now, I need to get Windows 8 back for work. How can I replicate the original layout with Windows 8 being put on both a SSD and a HDD. The nature of my work involves a lot of CAD software usage for projects as well as research and the like. As such, I would like for such software to be located on my SSD for faster speeds.
Tried numerous times to install the update but keeps hanging when at "Applying PC Settings". It usually stops at around 84%, eventually the screen will go black only showing the cursor then finally it shows the bsod. The bsod says: driver power state failure.
i have a newish samsung laptop that came preinstalled with windows 8 but i need to format the stock hard drive and i was wondering how i would reinstall full windows 8 without a product key.
My asus Laptop, K55N-DB81 has Linux on it. BUT before I had windows 8 on it. Now I want to re-install Windows 8 on it, but I don't know how to. I didn't create any recovery disks , and the Product Key is embedded into the Bios. I know what the Product Key IS just in case I would have to enter it again. Do I need to get an iso. to boot from and then go from there or something?
I have Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate installed and activated. I am trying to upgrade to Windows 8 and the upgrade assistant tells me it needs at least 2gb when I have 8gb and Windows 7 sees and knows I have 8gb
I am thinking it could be my bios, but it's already at the latest version
Here are some photos from my bios, so you can tell me if there is anything I need to enable.
These are photos from my bios. I need to change to get this to work.
I bought a HP notebook with windows 8.1 installed , but no installation DVD . In order to create one I downloaded from Microsoft , ( from windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media ) the Windows 8.1 Setup ( file OSGS14-WindowsSetupBox-32bitand64bit-English-4141408.exe ) and ran it but always receiving the message : we can't connect right now . I have tried more than 20 times and failed.
I tried to install Windows 8 Pro on my Dell PC, but I didnt know the clean install was the best way to go and now my computer will not boot to the OS. It boots then goes black.
I am trying to install the Windows 8 DVD over the current XP OS, but in MyComputer, the DVD Drive isn't listed in the tree view. Device manager says it's installed properly and functioning well. My Q is this: how do I run the installation DVD from the DVD drive using the Command Prompt. On Windows Start-up I hit F12 to access the boot order, and when I arrowed down to the DVD drive and hit ENTER, Windows would just jump straight to the XP start-up process. It's like something won't let me access the DVD Drive.
