I've gotten into a bit of a mess. Here's the situation:
- 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.
- I upgraded to Windows 10, as I was eligible.
- 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.