Hello,
Here's the explanation, my friend has purchased a laptop from his daughters fiancé, as soon as he got it he called me over because he had "problems". I arrived, and he passed the laptop over to me, his daughters fiancé's account was still active, I told my friend that he should take it back, to have him input his password, create a new user, or get him to re-format/restore the laptop to it's factory settings. However, his daughter lives over 100 miles away, so it's not a simple case of "popping over", and naturally, I wouldn't ever dream of asking for someone's credentials to access the laptop. So he told me to ignore all that and just reformat.
Not having a windows CD spare, I had a look in the laptop box, and came across a USB stick, which, according to the side of the box, is a windows installer. I thought this was going to be a cake walk, maybe an hour or two max. So I turned on the laptop, booted up from drive, clicked recovery options, selected the usb stick and nothing. It didn't even ask me which language I spoke, ready for re-format, there was just a circle loading icon spinning and spinning and spinning. Two hours passed before my friend ripped the usb stick and force restarted (against my advise). He then comes to me, with a USB stick HE had. He told me this was also a windows 10 file for re-formatting. I shrugged my shoulders, and plugged it in, trusting my friend of many years, restarted, booted through USB, and away we went, this time there was progress. I left his house when the laptop was on 32% of reformatting, it was getting late and I needed food.
I returned an hour later expecting to see progress, yet, it was still on 32%, I stayed there for a further 3 hours, with it remaining on 32%. by this time, I just needed to be home, I came home and went to be. He contacted me this morning, saying, the re-format had failed, and now, the OS is not on there, just the "recovery Screen", there's no log in screens, only the option to recover. We had a little discussion this morning and I shall be going up later today, It turns out the USB stick was a recovery stick for his old laptop, which I'm guessing is why this failed? It was a windows 10 laptop. (not too sure on that one).
However, case in point. I'm making a brand new boot disk, myself, which I can do, what I don't know, is, will his laptop recognise the product key on the system? Or will it ask me to input this information? I asked him to look for a product key and he says he can't find one anywhere inside the box or on the laptop itself. Either he's missing it, or, it doesn't have one.
So my question, after such a long explanation is this, Can I reformat with the system naturally knowing the product key? Or will he need to buy a new product key?
Just a few notes here, I have tried different USB ports, and I tried the original USB stick a couple of times, though it only provided the same result.
Here's the explanation, my friend has purchased a laptop from his daughters fiancé, as soon as he got it he called me over because he had "problems". I arrived, and he passed the laptop over to me, his daughters fiancé's account was still active, I told my friend that he should take it back, to have him input his password, create a new user, or get him to re-format/restore the laptop to it's factory settings. However, his daughter lives over 100 miles away, so it's not a simple case of "popping over", and naturally, I wouldn't ever dream of asking for someone's credentials to access the laptop. So he told me to ignore all that and just reformat.
Not having a windows CD spare, I had a look in the laptop box, and came across a USB stick, which, according to the side of the box, is a windows installer. I thought this was going to be a cake walk, maybe an hour or two max. So I turned on the laptop, booted up from drive, clicked recovery options, selected the usb stick and nothing. It didn't even ask me which language I spoke, ready for re-format, there was just a circle loading icon spinning and spinning and spinning. Two hours passed before my friend ripped the usb stick and force restarted (against my advise). He then comes to me, with a USB stick HE had. He told me this was also a windows 10 file for re-formatting. I shrugged my shoulders, and plugged it in, trusting my friend of many years, restarted, booted through USB, and away we went, this time there was progress. I left his house when the laptop was on 32% of reformatting, it was getting late and I needed food.
I returned an hour later expecting to see progress, yet, it was still on 32%, I stayed there for a further 3 hours, with it remaining on 32%. by this time, I just needed to be home, I came home and went to be. He contacted me this morning, saying, the re-format had failed, and now, the OS is not on there, just the "recovery Screen", there's no log in screens, only the option to recover. We had a little discussion this morning and I shall be going up later today, It turns out the USB stick was a recovery stick for his old laptop, which I'm guessing is why this failed? It was a windows 10 laptop. (not too sure on that one).
However, case in point. I'm making a brand new boot disk, myself, which I can do, what I don't know, is, will his laptop recognise the product key on the system? Or will it ask me to input this information? I asked him to look for a product key and he says he can't find one anywhere inside the box or on the laptop itself. Either he's missing it, or, it doesn't have one.
So my question, after such a long explanation is this, Can I reformat with the system naturally knowing the product key? Or will he need to buy a new product key?
Just a few notes here, I have tried different USB ports, and I tried the original USB stick a couple of times, though it only provided the same result.
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