Using Win 7 retail disk to reinstall HP laptop

Alun

A friend has dropped his HP laptop into me to look at and the hard disk is borked, so have ordered a new HDD and will have to reinstall Windows 7. Now he either never had or has lost the HP recovery disk set, and HP want €49 for new ones, so I've investigated the possibility of using one of the Digital River retail ISO's to reinstall instead.

Now, some online sources say this works perfectly OK using the code on the COA sticker, others say it won't and that you have to go through the phone activation procedure, something that having gone through it once I'd rather not repeat, so what's the opinion here? Is there a good chance it'll work or not?

L1011

It should work, otherwise the phone activation takes a few minutes and is automated

Alun

MYOB wrote: »

It should work, otherwise the phone activation takes a few minutes and is automated

Thanks. My experience with the phone activation was painful in as much as I got put through to an Indian call centre and had to get the agent to repeat each set of digits I had to input several times as I could barely hear / understand him. Maybe I was just unlucky, but I'd prefer not to have to do it if possible.

My experience with clean installs with OEM COA keys is that if you enter the key during Windows setup, you'll have to use the phone activation method. However, if you don't enter it during setup, and later enter it from the System properties applet, it will activate online just fine.

Alun

Karsini wrote: »

My experience with clean installs with OEM COA keys is that if you enter the key during Windows setup, you'll have to use the phone activation method. However, if you don't enter it during setup, and later enter it from the System properties applet, it will activate online just fine.

Great, thanks! The replacement disk hasn't arrived yet, so you've potentially saved me a lot of hassle.

Skatedude

The hp install info would have been on the hard drive in a seperate partition. but since the drive failed, then obviously you wont have access to it. never understand why they wont give you a disc anymore.

danger_mouse_tm

It will work, although unlike the recovery discs you will have to manually go to the HP support site after (possibly on another computer) and download all the drivers for your friend's laptop. An easy way to do it, is to check in device manager and see if you (at least) have an ethernet driver. Then let windows update pull as many drivers as it can find, then you only have to get the ones you need from the HP site. Finish the install by going to ninite.com and grabbing some usefull apps (pdf reader, libre office etc)

Alun

Yes, I realise I'll have to do that. In any case, the versions on the recovery partition or discs would probably be hopelessly out of date anyway, so would need to be updated. Also unless the Ethernet adapter is some weird unknown type Windows 7 will probably have a functioning one to tide me over until I can download newer versions of everything.

Capt'n Midnight

one tip for any operating system is to use a network cable when doing an install.

more bandwidth , and less faffing about with wifi passwords/settings/drivers , wifi is much easier to setup when you have the system up and running with the latest drivers.

Alun

Thanks, I've done reinstalls loads of times, so preaching to the converted there. It was just the issue of using a non-OEM disk to install that was the issue. Laptop is now back with the owner. Didn't need to phone activate either by the way, thank goodness.