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I've gotten into a bit of a mess. Here's the situation:

  1. I have a Dell laptop that had Windows 8 pre-installed. I don't have a key or anything, due to the fact that it was preinstalled and Windows 8 now reads the key from the firmware.
  2. I upgraded to Windows 10, as I was eligible.
  3. During a regular shutdown and update of Windows 10, it abruptly killed the machine. Windows won't start, just a black screen after the Dell logo, and attempting to do a repair with a bootable USB did not solve the issue.

So now the computer is in a weird state where I tried to reformat the machine using gParted, but I may have done it slightly wrong. Booting up the machine results in a blue screen that says "Your PC/Device needs to be repaired. A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed. File:\Windows\system32\winload.efi"

When I try to use gParted, I can see the hard drive and the partitions. The hard drive has three partitions called /dev/sd1 (formatted as ntfs, flags hidden,diag), /dev/sda2 (formatted as fat32, flags boot,esp), /dev/sda4 (formatted as ntfs, flags msftdata)

Right now I want to go back to Windows 8 as at least that OS was stable. The drive contains no important data so I'm fine with reformatting completely. I am trying to reinstall or repair the PC with a bootable USB for Windows 8, but when I try to reinstall it asks me for a serial which I don't have. I notice when I try to use the repair option with the Windows 8 USB drive, it seems to detect two copies of "Windows 10 (on volume 3)", so I'm not sure what that means.

Am I out of luck? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

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  • You should contact Microsoft about the key
    – Racing121
    Oct 6, 2015 at 6:32
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    Did you create recovery disks when you first got the PC? If not you need to get some from Dell. Request Backup & Recovery Discs for your system (US, Canada and UK only)
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Oct 6, 2015 at 9:27
  • Simplest solution. Delete the partitions then using a Windows 8 installation disk to install Windows 8, the installation key will automatically be detected. If it is asking for a serial then the version of Windows 8 you are trying to install isn't identical to the version that came with your machine. You can also of course just install Windows 10 in order to get a working operating system then go from there since the upgrade was a successful you would be able to format the hdd and install Windows 10 without a problem.
    – Ramhound
    Oct 6, 2015 at 12:04
  • Ramhound, thank you that worked! I ended up deleting all the partitions. And the system asking for my key was my mistake, I was creating a USB recovery drive for Windows 8.1 Pro when I needed Windows 8.1!
    – mruboy
    Oct 8, 2015 at 2:12

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