Hard drive failure - installing Win7 on new drive from OEM partition on failed drive.

pinksoir · 25-03-2011 4:43pm #1

Hey, hope someone can help.

The hard drive from my laptop has recently failed. There was signs of it failing for a while which I never picked up on; skipping/freezing video, etc.

Anyway, recently it began blue screening so I restored it to it's factory settings from the partition. It was grand for a few days but now it won't boot. It's stuck in a startup loop. When I tried to use startup repair it tells me that it can't fix the problems. So then I tried to reformat again, but this time it just comes up with an error and it won't go any further. I even tried booting a recovery disc from USB, but no dice.

I'm presuming that it's a HDD failure. RAM is seated properly etc.

The problem is that I don't have a Win7 disc. It's an OEM partition on the drive which I never bothered to create a backup of. What's the story in this situation? How will I go about installing Win7 on a new drive? Is it possible to copy the OEM image from the failed drive? And if so, how do I do that?

Thanks in advance

dunworth1 · 26-03-2011 4:32pm

do you have the windows 7 sticker with the product code

if so then you could just get a windows 7 install disc or make your own.
it should work but sometimes it happens that you have to ring Microsoft to activate it over the phone.

pinksoir · 29-03-2011 4:19pm

Cheers. I went ahead and downloaded an installation disc and reformatted. Seems alright now.

Hard drive failure - installing Win7 on new drive from OEM partition on failed drive.

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