You could download the iso and burn it to a DVD, if you can use that.
Otherwise, use Rufus
Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way
to create a bootable flash drive from the iso - of course, that's assuming you can see the flash drive from Windows in the usual way.
It's easier if you use a DVD and burn the iso to it in the usual way.
I don't think you've actually stated if your laptop has a DVD drive or not... I'm assuming you just chose to use a (big enough) flash drive- 3Gb or larger.
f you use the media creation tool to create the bootable USB flash drive, that should work on a functional PC.
Once you have a bootable medium, you will probably need to change a setting in your ('broken') laptop's BIOS to boot from it.
Last edited by dalchina; 26 Sep 2016 at 16:09.
The busted pc does not have a DVD drive. In fact, I had to go buy a flash drive, so there's another $20 or so Microsoft owes me. I followed your instructions, and am now downloading Windows 8.1 to the flash drive. Hopefully, I can use that to restore the busted laptop. Thanks for the tip on settings. I hope I can get to it to change it.
Ok- so you're planning to go back to Win 8, and not install Win 10.
Actually it's more a matter of choice as to whether you bought a laptop with a DVD drive or not. So for example if you also want a general recovery boot disk (there's one produced by a senior member of this forum) - that's another flash drive. And if you want one for disk imaging- that's another. And then you might want one for a partition manager..
I am rapidly reaching the point of despair here. Following your instructions, I managed to download Windows 8.1 to a flash drive on my old computer but it won't install on the new computer because I don't have a product key for the laptop. (I bought the laptop from Amazon. I no longer have the documentation that came with it, if any, and it doesn't seem to appear online.) I tried again to copy the Windows 10 media creation tool and it again refuses to recognize the flash drive.
You will be able to install Win 10 without a key.
You can also use an external hard drive to boot from.
Can you confirm that if you insert the flash drive you can view it in explorer?
Or in disk management?
(Windows key + R, diskmgmt.msc)
If so, you can use the Win 10 iso + Rufus to create a bootable Win 10 medium.
This separates the downloading and creation tasks.
Failing all that, get a USB optical disk drive (pretty cheap) and use a DVD.
Perhaps you know someone who's familiar with installing Windows on PCs who can help?
Maybe I'll try re-installing Windows 10. Thank you for your patient responses. Another user, who shall remain anonymous, informed me that "Microsoft does not break computers," which is a way of saying, "you are an idiot."
I can understand your frustration- many years ago I determined to be prepared for when things go wrong as far as I could. I've had to recover from a failed mother board, lost partition structures, a failing hard drive, unbootable PCs etc..
Partly it's about having the right kind of backups, partly the right boot media.
But I've never lost anything significant that I can think of.
I think it's literally true that MS does not break PCs. That is, installing its software does not literally cause the hardware to fail. But it is true that enough users - esp. with Win 10- have had experiences of inaccessible disks, data apparently not being transferred when upgrading, and sometimes making programs incompatible.
Thus some users experience failures in function of the OS after some updates or upgrades. This, in the case of Win 10, is widely documented.
MS's apparently market insensitive attitudes and failure to communicate change in advance, taking users by surprise, has done them no favours, together with difficulties for some in downloading and completing updates.
I'm happy with Win 10 myself- I just don't use the universal apps or its start menu, and rarely Cortana.
But whether "broke" is the right word or not, I have a computer that does not operate, and I'm well into Day 2 of trying to fix it. I can't load Windows 10 onto a flash drive because MS can't "find" the flash drive. It could find the flash drive when I tried loading Windows 8.1, so I tried that. Now it's demanding a product key in order to install it, which I can't find. There is a reason why Microsoft is so widely loathed. Nobody but a genuine enthusiast could possibly put up with the aggravation that it imposes on its customers. I am a freelance writer, and I cannot do my work efficiently. If I pay to have this computer fixed, or buy a new one, tomorrow Microsoft could disable it again, at any moment.
Quote