DavidTheWin
New Member
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2011
Last Thursday I tried removing my Ubuntu partition on my hard drive (I gave the partition 200 out of 500gb rather foolishly and I wanted the space back instead of buying a new hard drive), but failed to reconfigure the boot loader correctly. I ended up with a 500gb drive with about 200gb of stuff on it that I wanted to keep that wouldn't boot (error message 0xc000000f). Because it is a store bought computer, I didn't get the Windows 7 installation disk so I couldn't do anything to fix it just then (which is probably a virtue). I spoke to some people at a computer repair store that I'd done some work experience with. They told me I'd be better off buying a new hard drive, installing Windows 7 on it, backing up everything I wanted to (near enough all 200gb) then formatting my old hard drive. I decided to do this since I wanted a new hard drive anyway, and they gave me a Windows 7 installation disk with it. The old drive had Home Premium 64 bit, but after installing on the new drive I realised I had installed a 32 bit version of Home Premium which my 64bit product key isn't valid for. I have tried to repair the BCD on the old drive using the disk and although it did find the Windows 7 installation, it wouldn't add it to the boot list because of something to do with not being able to find the correct device.
The final situation is as such:
Old drive: 64 bit Home Premium, won't boot, 200gb of data that I would like to keep
New drive: 32 bit Home Premium, product key won't work for it and I'd like to utilise my entire 4gb of RAM and the other benefits of a 64 bit system, back up of the original 200gb of data.
What seemed to be the best way to approach it would be to do a clean install of 64 bit Home Premium on my new drive which should be valid for my product key, then re-backup all the data on my old drive then format the old drive. I'd end up with:
Old drive: Freshly formatted
New drive: 64 bit Home Premium, valid key, booting, 200gb of original data
I don't remember seeing an option to install 32 or 64 bit during the installation, and I've watched the tutorial from this forum on youtube and didn't see it there. So finally (thanks for sticking through to the end), my questions are as follows:
Is there a different installation disk for each of the 32 bit and 64 bit versions?
If not, is it possible that the guys at the computer repair store just burned the 32 bit section rather than the 64 bit section?
What can I do to obtain a legal copy of 64 bit Home Premium ASAP (university application deadlines loom, and I don't want to rely entirely on college computers)?
Will my product key from my old installation still work on this new installation once I install the 64 bit version?
Any other advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
The final situation is as such:
Old drive: 64 bit Home Premium, won't boot, 200gb of data that I would like to keep
New drive: 32 bit Home Premium, product key won't work for it and I'd like to utilise my entire 4gb of RAM and the other benefits of a 64 bit system, back up of the original 200gb of data.
What seemed to be the best way to approach it would be to do a clean install of 64 bit Home Premium on my new drive which should be valid for my product key, then re-backup all the data on my old drive then format the old drive. I'd end up with:
Old drive: Freshly formatted
New drive: 64 bit Home Premium, valid key, booting, 200gb of original data
I don't remember seeing an option to install 32 or 64 bit during the installation, and I've watched the tutorial from this forum on youtube and didn't see it there. So finally (thanks for sticking through to the end), my questions are as follows:
Is there a different installation disk for each of the 32 bit and 64 bit versions?
If not, is it possible that the guys at the computer repair store just burned the 32 bit section rather than the 64 bit section?
What can I do to obtain a legal copy of 64 bit Home Premium ASAP (university application deadlines loom, and I don't want to rely entirely on college computers)?
Will my product key from my old installation still work on this new installation once I install the 64 bit version?
Any other advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks