Repair Corrupt Install From Boot Install DVD?

I just ran HD Tune on the bad drive and it found one bad sector. It's a good prog by looks of it. But it doesn't say whether or not it fixes bad sectors? I suppose it does, flags them as bad and removes them from use?

Anyway it didn't help.

I tried various of those Function options - start in safe with networking, disable malware thing, enable debugging, logging - but nothing helped, it only annoyed me by jumping off immediately on a keypress so's for five options i had five restarts....

Not that I'm aware of, apart from running CHKDSK. You'd need to be "in" the problem OS, in order to do an in-place repair install.

that's why showkeyplus is a no-go for me at this time.

What Bree gave you was the generic key for W10Pro. But, you shouldn't need a key at all if the system previously had W10 installed and activated. That's why the question comes up, did you install the correct version?

yep. and how'm i going to know? where do i look to get the definitive answer for each drive - given that one drive can't be run as a system drive?

On this good drive with no key (now) it says in settings:

Edition: Win10Pro. No build data at all.
Product ID: 00330-80000-00000-AA240

I can't run that on the other.

It is beginning to look to me like there's something wrong with my key along the lines of the 'too many copies' thing or something like that. Why on earth wouldn't Windows just come out and tell you if that's the case? You don't know whether to keep trying or to give up...


I think we need to know how to inspect a win10 system disk when it is not being used as a system disk and to detect all problems and extract all version and key info and so on.

lay the patient on the table and operate.

there's something wrong with the kernel of this OS that's stopping it trucking on....

Can't even bring it up in safe mode with debugging... my googling seems to indicate you have to have the system coming up before you can interrupt it and send it back to come up in safe mode.... which i guess is what was happening with all my attempts previously that culminate in the endless cycling round....

we need a safe mode and debugger that steps along to where all that stuff starts and identifies why it chose to take that path...

oh, i didn't realise showkeyplus was on kyhi's media. i don't understand win8/8.1. Is that another way of saying 'win10' ? It came with win10 on it.

i'm swapping system disks in and out of the same machine here all the time. and grabbing a few minutes from my job when i can..

i'll swap it in again and run the kyhi.

Well I ran it and I get 'OEM key not present in firmware' which I guess is the BIOS.

And no mention of any editions.

Just product Win10 Pro.

And a product ID. 00330-80000-00000-AA240 in this case which is the new drive.

I only have one drive on the machine right now. For simplicity I took out two internal drives and two external.

I might be doing something wrong here. I've got that generic key in there right now, you know?

All I get from that check that is Windows 10 Professional RTM retail. something like that.

That information pertains to that key?

We're after - what? Information pertaining to the installed OS?

p.s. I didn't look at your infinite loop recovery link for win7 until now. that's interesting. i think I'll give it a go.