My hard drive on my other PC is totally fried. There's no backup (nothing much to save on there). I'm going to have to do a clean install on a new hard drive and all I have is my old windows 7 key. Is it going to let me activate windows 10 without any trouble?
If you have activated 10 before, Windows will remember it, there is no need to enter key anymore.
In the future, link your licence to MS account, it will make it easier in case of serious hardware failures.
Microsoft Account - Link to Digital License on Windows 10 PC - Windows 10 Forums
Yes, MS has copied your hardware info before, if you would be replacing motherboard, that would be more problematic.
First version from 2015 used to ask, but I have never seen it afterwards, maybe it depends on the version.
Actually, yes - but you don't need to give if your previous installation had been activate. You DO have to be careful to install the same version as you had previously though. If you had 'Home' or 'Pro' your activation is only valid for a clean install of the same edition. You'll see a screen like this...
...just select 'I don't have a product key'. Once installed you should find it has be activated automatically using your previous digital licence.
The above posts are correct.
Went through this myself today with my sons laptop. New Hdd fitted and restored from the recovery partition to Win 8 Home.
I completely updated it to 8.1.1 and downladed Win 10 using the media creation tool.
To make it more nerve wracking, I created a new microsoft account and used that as part of the installation - rather than a local account. Everything worked perfectly - fully activated and he can add his original log in details at a leter date.
p.s - skipped past the licence box. It gave the option of reinstalling a previous installation of Win 10
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