Windows 10: Installing Win10 after the free upgrade period ends

Hello,

This is my first time here and couldn't find an answer after a few minutes of searching. Sorry if this has been asked already...

Anyway, I have an HP laptop that came with windows 8 and has a ~20Gb recovery partition that re-installs Win8 and all the bundled software. After I upgraded to Win10, I made a recovery drive. When creating the recovery drive it asked for a 32Gb USB drive which I provided and it seemed to work fine. I later used the recovery drive to re-install windows; but, it was windows 8 again. I then had to download and install the free upgrade again. What will happen if I want to re-install win10 after the free upgraded period ends? Will the upgrade still be available from somewhere as long as I have a hardware profile on an activation server? Or, maybe I have to do something different when creating the recovery drive? I'd really rather not get stuck with Win8 in the future.

BTW, my PC at work was an upgrade from 7 to 10 and I made a recovery drive there also. That PC doesn't have a recovery partition and only required 4Gb for the recovery drive. Should I expect this drive to re-install win7 and require me to download 10 again also?

Thank you in advance for any information.

:)

 

Windows 10 - After the "FREE UPGRADE" period ends....

 

Windows 10 - After the "FREE UPGRADE" period ends....

Windows 10 is registered by Microsoft for your computer, and reinstalling Windows 10 will automatically reactivate so you should not need a product key the second time around.

Need the re-installation media (2 choices:

1) Use the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Note: When you click on the above link, please read the instructions carefully.

2) You can also download the Windows 10 ISO file(s) version 1511 from Microsoft's Tech Bench:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/techbench


　


How to use Microsoft's
Tech Bench web site to download a Windows 10 ISO file, create installation media and activate Windows 10

: http://www.pagestart.com

 

The recovery partitions that came preinstalled with your computers will reinstall what ever came originally.
You can use the Media creation tool (see below) from Microsoft to create media to reinstall Windows 10 and if you have upgraded and activated previously, you can perform a clean install and it will be activated. No key required.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10/

 

You don't need recovery partitions. You can make recovery tools outside the PC as suggested above. But for me, the best way is to make image backups using free Macrium Reflect. Recovery can take an hour or more. Image restoration can be done in minutes depending on the machine and size of image.

 

Thanks! I actually found this tool not long after I posted this question... I tried it last night and it worked as expected. I deleted the Win8 recovery partition (that I have backed up) and used the USB media this tool created to install Win10.

This Media creation tool does what I thought creating a recovery drive did; but, the recovery drive just backed up the original recovery partition.

Thank you for the replys. I got it working perfectly now.