Upgrade new system drive to Win 10

Hi, all. My first post to this forum.

I'm currently running Win 10 on my seven year old desktop PC. At one point I upgraded from Windows 7 using the free upgrade executable 24074, which I still have. Based on a quick Google search, it appears that the web link to the upgrade assistant.I used then is no longer valid.

Here's why all that matters - I'm considering upgrading my operating system drive to an M.2 SSD (yes, my MB is compatible}. My question is, since I don't have an actual Windows 10 disk or product key, how do I go about installing Win 10 on the new drive?

Thanks in advance.

Any change of disk or RAM has no significance as far as your digital activation rights are concerned, being held on MS servers against a hash of a form of your hardware id which excludes those.

You can clone your existing O/S to a new drive and clean install Win10 with impunity.

Transferring to a different PC and other hardware changes usually needs to be handled differently- as per the tutorials (in the huge searchable Tutorials section - do have a look) it's then useful to have your activation linked to a MS live id.

I don't have an actual Windows 10 disk

You can create one free- for any build of Win 10. See the relevant tutorial.

Hello @picktoo and welcome to TenForums.

As mentioned you can just "transfer" your Windows install to the new SSD, using backup software, or you can do a clean install of Windows 10. For example, step #1 in the tutorial has a link to how to "create" Windows 10 install media on a USB stick.
There are lots of "links" in tutorials.

Clean Install Windows 10

Although you can clone the current installation to the M.2 NVMe drive, my recommendation is to do a clean install as your current came from Win 7 and has a lot of trash on it.

On a clean install you MUST Detach any other drives (SATA or Power cable) from the MB or you may end with the boot loader in one drive and the OS on another.

I suggest you build the USB Win 10 22h2 installation drive using MCT

Reset BIOS or load defaults.
Set Disk mode to AHCI, not RAID
Select OS mode = UEFI or Select OS mode = other + UEFI (depends on BIOS).
Disable fast boot and secure boot (you can turn it on after installation)

Windows can be installed in two ways: Legacy-MBR or UEFI-GPT
To install as Legacy-MBR you must boot the installation drive as Legacy
To install as UEFI-GPT you must boot the installation drive as UEFI.

As you have a UEFI BIOS, you should install as UEFI-GPT
Detach any other drives (SATA or Power cable) from the MB.

During POST, press F12(?) to launch the boot menu. You will see two options for the USB drive. USB UEFI (Name) and USB (Name). Select USB UEFI (Name) to install as UEFI-GPT.
Go to install and delete ALL partitions on the main drive till you have one and only one unallocated space and then proceed.
If you don't want to use MS account, don't enable updates or connect to the internet during installation.