How do you recover windows when your hard drive fails?

Question

A little computer problem I'm have has made me curious, and it might be helpful in the future, so I'll ask now.

Say you have a notebook with a recovery partition, like most do nowadays. However, sometimes hard drives fail. I've personally had this happen- I believe it was a Toshiba hard drive that apparently had a propensity to set a password on itself when it was failing, which was altogether confusing. At the time, everybody with a desktop had an XP disk laying around, so throwing a new hard drive in and installing windows was simple.

But what do you do now? You need a new hard drive, but you don't have any copy of an OS to install on it. You can't even buy Windows by itself, you can either get an upgrade or show proof that you've purchased parts for a system, neither of which help. You could use another computer and download Linux, but you really want windows. They'd probably do it for you at Best Buy IF you buy the hard drive from them AND have them install it, but by that time, you're almost better off with a new computer.

So, where do you get Windows?

Answer 1

When you buy a new machine from companies like DEll or HP they usually come with a partition that has the OS and drivers. While the BISO/CMOS is loading in your manual there should be a key combination you can press which will allow you to access this. If your HDD dies than your out of luck. It's best to always make a backup. In that case you will need to call the manufacture see if it's still under warranty if not it's best to buy a XP or windows 7 CD.



If you have not deleted everything off the HDD i'd suggest to use http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm level 2 is usually best for SSD as well I'd suggest not to defragment SSD drives

Answer 2

If you google for "buy windows 7" you will get a lot of hits like the first 2 links.

If you buy a new hard drive that is enough to qualify you to buy windows as part of hardware upgrade/change.

As the third link explains "since you have the previous version FULL Windows license and qualify for the Windows 7 Upgrade, you have the rights to do a “clean” install". You have the windows product key on the computer you bought with windows preinstalled.

In fact if you got a copy of windows somewhere you can use YOUR product key to reinstall windows. See last link. This is also true for windows 7

Hope this clears things up for you.

Answer 3

hard drive r the most reliable thing on the computer i've been working on them for 20 yrs & never seen 1 fail I can take them a part & get them moving again, so u hard id not being seen by ur computer use it show up in m computer, then it's there right click go to properties do a disk clean-up & ur done...........

Answer 4

If you want windows you have to pay. If you pay the full retail price then there are no hardware transfer restrictions. Just cant use on 2 pc at the same time.

OEM cannot be transfered in vista or 7



If your pc fails to boot try this to recover data

http://help.artaro.eu/index.php/data-recovery/recover-files-from-hard-disk.html#.UIVFfunDmCA

Answer 5

Lo último que compre fue un hard disk externo, siempre han sido de calidad los productos que he comprado en los sitios web pero esta compra ha pasado mis expectativos, un transporte muy rápido y un producto excelente de buena marca a un precio sin igual, seguramente la mejor compra.

Answer 6

attempt a low-factor copying of your archives using the coolest previous DOS command on the spot. Helped me previously. Please take observe you opt to attempt this right this moment as you already said that your rigidity is failing, it might want to easily be any second at the same time as it fails thoroughly.

Answer 7

You could either download it or just buy a copy off of newegg.ca or amazon.ca

Answer 8

"You can't even buy Windows by itself"



WRONG.



Yes you can.