Windows 10: Boot drive is COMPLETELY dead. How can I get my windows License back for the new boot drive...

Recently, My laptop had the boot drive die I've used several programs to try and get data from it but no luck. I also brought the laptop into a PC repair shop but they couldn't do anything either. I'm buying a new hard drive to boot from and I wonder if there's a way to get back the windows 11 license for this machine. Thanks in advance for the help

:)

 

Windows 7 booting off wrong drive?!?!?

Please move if this is in the wrong place.

I have two hard drives, a 1.5TB drive, and a 160GB drive. Windows is installed on the 1.5TB drive, as are all my files and programs. The 160GB drive has a bunch of old files, and apparently the bootmgr and boot folder. Nothing else is on the 160GB drive, other than media files etc.

If I remove the 160GB drive from the machine, windows refuses to boot, plug it back in, it works fine. The setup with two hard drives I have now is temporary, as the 160GB drive will go into another machine.

My question is, can someone give me a step by step on how to make windows force to boot off the 1.5TB drive, ignoring the 160GB drive in the boot process completely?
I don't know how to do this in Windows 7, on XP I would just run the /fixmbr command and its related ones.

Any help would be appreciated.

Note: I would really really rather not have to wipe and reinstall, I know it can be done without one as I've had this issue with XP before.

 

Lost the Seagate...

The drive seems to be completely dead, my computer will not boot if I have it connected...to the windows cd or the new installation on the F1 drive (which is the boot drive now by the way)

Thanks for the above article, im booting into Vista: U 64 right now, I cant follow those steps if the drive is in, it will lock up before it gets that far or if its not a cold boot the drive does not appear on the list.

 

Windows 10 boot drive

Is Windows 10 also limited to a max of 3Tb for a boot drive?