trying to repair an expired RC windows 10

[Smactek]

Here is where I am at. HP desktop, that came with vista x64, and a free upgrade to win7 pro, from hp. All was fine for many months, until a microsoft update, installed a few unsupported drivers. The system would only boot via safe mode, with temporary driver signature bypass enabled. I tried doing many different things, via the MSDN forums, and got nowhere. Out of frustration, I installed the windows 10 RCB 10166. which fixed everything. The Upgrade also kept, all the existing win7 programs, the user had installed. Out of habit, I installed a second hard drive of the same size (1 TB) and cloned the drive before the upgrade (just in case) then unplugged it, and performed the update.

However, this version of windows 10 RCB expired, on October 15, and the system would no longer boot up. I was not informed of the warnings prior to the expiration. I have now, made another clone of the drive, and am trying to get the system to boot, so I can upgrade to the newest windows 10 RCB (version 10565) which doesn't expire until July, 2016. In hopes of retaining all of the software, and data still on the machine. I can recover the data from the clone, but what a lot of work. Apparently, the machine has to boot into the OS, to perform, an in place upgrade, and keep all of the existing files. So I made a second partition, and installed the newest window 10 RCB. It boots as it should, now, do any of you know what root files I need to copy from the bootable version, to overwrite the non bootable partition, so I can upgrade, that partition with the newer version as well.

Any thought would be greatly appreciated.

 

[clifford_cooley]

You should not have had anything of importance on a pre-release OS. I like helping people but I have to draw a line somewhere. If you are not capable of keeping up with your own files, you never should have installed Windows 10 RC. You must have expected an expiration date at some point without proper activation in a pre-release build.

With that said what you should do now is purchase Windows 10 and install without formatting. Your files will either be where they always were or in a Windows.old folder. I can't say without uncertainty which will be the case.

There is also the option of using a Linux Boot Disk to retrieve your files. I'm of no help in that regard, I just know it is an option.

 

[Smactek]

Thanks for your input. It is a friends machine. Kind of got himself in a rut. I pulled a copy of anything important, off the drive. I sure do miss the windows ability to throw the disc in, and just overwrite the system files, from days gone by. Going to pop the drive out, and remotely copy the bcd store entries, and drop them in the non-bootable partition, rename it active, and see if I can get windows, to show some life there. The plan is to purchase win 10 pro, for this box. just trying to avoid reinstalling the programs that have been installed over the last year.