Windows 10: OS drive crashed without a backup/boot

Hi, my Wife's OS SSD drive crashed and appears to be dead. I've put it in a different computer without any success. She can't find or didn't have a recovery drive and we don't know where the Win10 install USB drive is for her computer. I have one for mine but the product key of course will not work on her computer.


How do I get her back up and running? I can install using my USB from MSFT but we don't have her product key and I have no way to recover one at this point as the drive it was on is kaput . Do we need to purchase a new win10 lic?

:)

 

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?

 

Using network hard drive for backup

It depends what sort of backup you want to do. If you're happy just backing up regular files, then there are a bazillion (really, that many!) different bits of freeware to do that. There is a good list here:

Download Back Up Tools for Windows - MajorGeeks

and pretty much all of them can do network backups. Some even have fancy options like encryption. Really, the most useful thing is just being able to schedule them and know they ran OK.

You may also want to make a system image backup too, and you'll find that software in the very same list.

I don't have Windows 8 as yet, so I'm afraid I can't suggest any for that platform. Personally, I use Clonezilla for image backups.

 

Windows backup saying a drive is a system drive when it is not.

The terminology can get a little confusing. Microsoft uses the term "system" drive as the one containing the boot files. The OS drive is labeled as "Boot" drive.

A Windows 7 backup operation will backup all critical partitions. In your case, with a Legacy install, probably the System reserved partition and the OS partition. If another partition has been added by Windows, it could be involved.

As suggested, a picture would clear things up.