This is a follow-up post on my previous post about. It is obvious, that when you remove the old hard drive from your PC and replace it with a new one, all your stuff won't be on the new drive. 'All your stuff' includes Windows operating system, your user profile information, settings, background picture of your desktop, all your precious photos. The list goes on. So to succesfully replace the hard drive, some preliminary steps are needed.
I've got a Dell Latitude E6410 Laptop with a Windows 7 Professional OS installed on it which needs a fresh win install on it. Windows 7 Professional OEM ISO download. Windows 7 Pro OA.
Even in the best case, where you're prepared to lose all of your files and information, the only thing that you need to transfer is your Windows 7 license. In Microsoft lingo it is called.
This literally means, that your Windows will emulate and 'call home' to verify, that you are allowed to run the installation. In this particular case following circumstances exist: • The laptop in question is manufactured by HP/Compaq • HP/Compaq is a Microsoft partner and they get their Windows 7 licenses with special pricing • The hardware must has a suitable identification for the OEM partner in its BIOS called SLIC • Actual Windows 7 license (activation) will be stored on the hard drive, the OEM product key of this installation is not known • It is impossible to transfer the activation from old hard drive to the new one. It is possible to re-activate on the new drive when the existing OEM product key has been extracted from the old Windows 7 installation. Hp Compaq Presario Cq60 Drivers For Xp. • There is nothing illegal in this procedure.
You bought the hardware, you own the hardware. With hardware you paid for the Windows 7 license.
This is NOT software piracy of any kind. Abandoned options There are three good possibilities of transferring an existing Windows installation to the new drive. I chose not to use either of those. It is possible to create a recovery disc from existing installation. This has been covered in articles and.
There was a glitch, though. The HP Backup & Recovery manager was not installed to this Compaq laptop. I found an article which points to softpaq containing the installer.
Another way would be to use the Windows 7 built-in backup. There is an option to create the system recovery image. Apparently HP/Compaq chooses to go with this on consumer models. Other possibilities would include,, or similar to transfer the entire drive with all the partitions. The reason why I abandoned all of those was that I definitely wanted a fresh start without any old payload. The HP Backup & Recovery would provide the cleanest start, but still there are a number of weird software being installed, which nobody actually needs or wants. Another thing is that Windows 7 fresh install on SSD takes care of setting the -flag to the partition and aligns the partitions properly on 4096 byte boundaries.
Both of those settings differ when installing to a hard drive. These are pretty much the only differences when installing to SSD instead of HD, but I definitely wanted to get all of my performance settings right from the beginning. Prerequisites for license transfer When talking about OEM Windows 7 licenses, following license types exist OEM Channel SLP, NONSLP and COA License Product Keys. The difference of those is explained in detail in.
To put it briefly, in every OEM machine there must be a sticker somewhere. The sticker has the Certificate of Authentication (COA) key. This OEM COA key can be used to activate a Windows 7 installation only via phone. It is a possibility, but not my first choice as there are other options available. Hp Compaq Dc5100 Sff Base Unit Drivers For Xp. Every OEM Windows 7 also has an OEM System Locked Pre-installation key.
Hp Pavilion Dv9620us Driver Manual. The key is not available anywhere. It is hidden intentionally, for the reason that nobody would ever try anything I'm about to describe in this post. To dig out the SLP-key, you will need a special piece of software.