Windows 10: My hard drive crashed. How can I get my previously loaded Windows 10 free upgrade back?

I purchased the Dell laptop loaded with Windows 7. I went through the free upgrade to Windows 10. Then my hard drive crashed. Apparently, my new hard drive is loaded with an expiring version of Windows 10. How can I get back my previous free upgrade??

Thanks.

"Kathy on Dell Laptop"

:)

 

Hard drive crash and reload Windows 10

My hard drive crashed and I need to load Windows 10 on the new drive. How do I go about this as I upgraded from windows 7 electronically.

 

Hard drive/ OS issue

a guy suggested :

• shutdown
• unhooked HDD
• restarted
• yay !!
• reconnected HDD
• restarted
• yay !!

also , try method 3
How do I unlock the drive where Windows 10 is installed?

 

Windows 10 upgrade rant..

The free space shouldn't prevent you from upgrading to built 1607. I manually upgraded my own laptop which had only 9gigs free space left on the system drive.

I unzipped the Windows 10 Pro anniversary edition ISO on my D drive, and started the upgrade process from there. At one point the installer complained about not having enough free space on the main drive, i just had to point it to the D drive to proceed to the next step. Now the rollback installation is stored there and doesn't clog up the C drive anymore.

In your case you could insert a large sdcard to act as the required rollback drive, i'm pretty sure it would do the trick.

Oh and by the way, if you want to further compress your System files:

• do a search Command Prompt, right-click it, and select Run as administrator.
• Type COMPACT.EXE /CompactOS:always and hit Enter.

You'll will gain anything from 2 to 4 gigs free space after it's done.