Laptop-Windows help please!

[Turdle]

Welp, my 6 year old hard drive died a slow death. I had stuck it into the freezer it to allow it to do it's self repairs, weeding out bad sector and such, which worked fine until the 500 gb slowly worked itself into about 300gb of usable space. Fine for me as all I do is internet and photos. even then I only had it 60% full.

Yesterday however it died. Virus, malware, old age? I am not sure.

So, keeping in mind I have to go cheap on the fix I want to replace the hard drive.

The issue I am having with this is my restore discs are an old version of windows 7.
I did the "free upgrade" to window 10 sometime within the last year and was using it just fine. I have no problems with it , in fact I prefer it now. This PC will operate fine with it.

My problem is something I noticed yesterday while trying to give this hard drive another kick. While doing a re image, a screen came up saying I was running an old version of windows 7. It directed me to a location to buy windows 10. Then the hard drive died again during the long list of updates. Internet explorer would not let me on the internet because it was such an outdated version.

So, my question.
If I buy a new hard drive and re-image it with my win7 system restore discs, will it allow me to upgrade to win 10 again or do I indeed need to purchase a license? Is there a good known workaround? If not, how much should I expect to pay for an upgrade from win 7 to win10?

I am not at all interested in learning-installing a different operating system, nor would I choose to buy an apple based product.

I appreciate input.

 

[justgetinstarte]

I would get a copy of win 10 and install a fresh copy aka reformat and install of win 10. Yes you will have to get a copy of win 10 as you are now out of the free upgrade period.

 

[Turdle]

Microsoft said my free upgrade "should" install on my old win 7 as they have the license keys on file. However, my win 7 license is oem and locked to the old hard drive, so, to procede I do indeed have to purchase a win10 OS. Win7 is still supported but not available.

It's issues like this that make me feel I am being help for ransom. They will get $$ from me in some form, sooner or later. Not feeling much love for microsoft right now.

 

[toypaseo]

PM sent...

 

[justgetinstarte]

That's what started me on linux not that it's your solution but it was mine. 11 years ago.

 

[Turdle]

Well, new hard drive in, and I think I'm back.

 

[BrooklynBay]

Connect the old drive as a secondary drive to see if you could get anything off of it. Which brand was the old drive? Are you using Windows 7 now?

 

[Turdle]

Connect the old drive as a secondary drive to see if you could get anything off of it. Which brand was the old drive?

It crashed after being re imaged. All data was destroyed.
The failed HDD was a western digital brand which was over 6 years old, so I replaced it with the very same drive, found on ebay for 19.00

My win 7 version was so old internet explorer would not run, so i had to use wife's laptop to make a firefox install disc.
During the install of my original 6 year old image a warning screen came up saying I had an old version of win7 which was not secure. There was a "get windows 10" option and a smaller, sort of hidden "install win7 sp1" option. I clicked on that and it seemed to speed up the updating.

Now running OEM windows 7 on a replacement drive so I guess you can indeed do this.

 

[BrooklynBay]

I don't know why Internet Explorer didn't work. I'm using Win XP with IE 8. It's not completely compatible with every website, so I use Google Chrome for websites which can't run IE 8.

 

[Josh P]

Microsoft said my free upgrade "should" install on my old win 7 as they have the license keys on file. However, my win 7 license is oem and locked to the old hard drive, so, to procede I do indeed have to purchase a win10 OS. Win7 is still supported but not available.

It's issues like this that make me feel I am being help for ransom. They will get $$ from me in some form, sooner or later. Not feeling much love for microsoft right now.

I was handed a laptop at work to fix that had a dead hard drive. It had the free upgrade of windows 10 done before it crashed. I downloaded windows 10 from microsoft, and it installed just fine on the new hard drive. I understand the pay up or else feeling, that is why I went to linux on my own computer.