A Basic HDD Replacement Question

Hi, having activated Win 10 on your PC, you can simply replace your HDD, and clean install Win 10 (x32 or x64 as you like). There should be no need to enter a license code. (I didn't have to). Worst case you'd need to contact MS, which should be relatively routine.

You don't have to reinstall Win 8.

Your best approach is to create a Win 10 install disk and proceed from there. Why? You can subsequently use it
a. as a boot disk
b. for an in place upgrade repair (see tutorial section) - a real plus feature in Win 10.
c. It's one download.

Personally I would skip updates while installing.
As soon as you have your drivers configured, and a working environment, use disk imaging and create an image.

Now, you have backups, great. But have you started to use disk imaging yet? (3rd party program recommended widely here for this).
Why?
- allows you to back up complete disks/partitions
- would have allowed to to put a new disk in, and recover your PC EXACTLY AS IT WAS when imaged, in under an hour. A massive time saving.
- you can mount the images and extract files
- you can update your images (updates are smaller and faster)
- can provide a migration route to a new PC by restoring to dissimilar hardware, or, as I've just done, 300 + programs, settings etc in about 3 hours (a lot of that processing the data).
- allows you to restore a non-booting PC to the state it was in when you created the image in under an hour without tech assistance. (Hardware faults excepted).

Macrium Reflect (free) doesn't support incremental imaging, but is extremely competent if a bit geeky. Currently I like O&O Diskimage 9 (not free) rather than Aomei Backupper (free is ok)

You need a large external disk, and you must create the boot medium and ensure your BIOS/UEFI is configured or can be configured to boot from it.

Blank disk = blank screen. You'll probably get a flashing white underline top left. Preceded by a manufacturer splash screen etc. BIOS or UEFI will load, that's all. As your specs are incomplete, I don't know which you're using. A problem you may face with UEFI is getting your PC to boot from an external bootable medium.

BIOS and UEFI know nothing about Windows. You could equally install Linux.
They only provide basic code that's loaded into RAM to enable you to use USB devices and DVD-ROM, and enough to start an OS running from a disk.

As regards UEFI I'm on a learning curve just having set up my new custom laptop from a clean install of win 10 to 300+ progs and settings in about 4 hours work- with appropriate disk images and tools to do the heavy lifting. Getting its UEFI to offer boot options required me to press a key (F7) whilst booting - and then the options offered were relatively uninterpretable. (I.e. nothing as easy as 'DVD-RW' was on offer - there was DVDRAM buried in a string o characters. Hmm, BIOS was easy. But UEFI implementations vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and from laptop to desktop. Then you run into Secure Boot (you want this off) and CSM (enabled for legacy e.g. USB boot it I vaguely recall).

You will want to review a few guides including one where you could have simply skipped the upgrade at this time unlike the initial requirement seen last summer to upgrade first and then seeing a clean install after 10 was activated the first time. Clean Install Windows 10 Directly without having to Upgrade First - Windows 10 Forums

Since your's was a direct upgrade by way of the Windows updates you will be needing some 10 media to work with! Besides the next guide there are actually two options one being the immediate creation of the USB Installation Key requiring an 8gb or 16gb flash drive since the Threashold 2 Update wraps up both the 32bit and 64bit flavors of both the Home and Pro editions into one large update seen in November. The alternative is the download page at the MS Tech Bench Program site there where you choose either the 32bit or 64bit dual edition iso at the present time. Windows 10 ISO Download - Windows 10 Forums

With the Media Creation tool mentioned in the guide there you can also download and save the "Windows.iso" file to a folder on the drive to have available. But you will first need to be on either another system or try running the "chkdks /r/f" command instead of the "chkdsk /f" since it appear the "/r" for repair seems to be working better lately the tne "/f" for Fix switch added onto the command. The iso download using the MC Tool will be a "4 in 1" while the Tech Bench is the dual edition being the main difference. At some were looking to see a consolation of editions made up for use on multiple systems while the November update had to be rolled up in order to work for everyone!

And of course the last guide here to get you going once the All in One you have there is back running again or you are on another machine to view is the one seen at Windows 10 - Clean Install - Windows 10 Forums

When going out to get another drive that will come in totally blank with nothing on it. You can follow the guide closely there or use a 3rd party drive partitioning program to see the replacement partitioned and formatted ahead of time and then won't need to use the Drive tools option when selecting the Custom option. That will simply avoid seeing the System Reserved partition created at the front of the drive being a problem for some at one time.

The guide will also explain how to get past the UEFI problem that can prevent booting up from a flash drive which I was running into on an HP 7 laptop as well as a new 10 laptop lately where you are then forced to boot live from optical media. If that becomes the case the best option would be the direct download for the dual edition iso from Tech Bench and

My impression of this is that restoring an image of the current mess wouldn't be making any progress but work in the opposite direction. Since this was an upgrade install to 10 it's highly more probable to assume the upgrade came out buggy while the bugs simply took longer to appear unlike finding the Start button missing or not able to open things up in the Start menu like the AllApps! A clean install since everything important is already backed up on the external which would have to be unplugged by the way during the fresh 10 install would clean all this up.

If you are not seeing a bugged up upgrade then you are likely seeing numerous disk errors on the drive which can also stall Windows from starting up and/or running properly. The Disk Check command with both the repair switches added to the command entered into the Command prompt(admin) option will schedule that again to see if cleaning things up will get 10 running again before a last resort being a clean install recommended or a fast second upgrade install to repair which is rather redundant. A clean install would be the option if cleaning up the disk errors fails to see effective results.