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#1
Recover Win 7 from a dead laptop
My laptop died and would not boot. I was unable to fix it so I bought a new laptop.
The hard drive on the dead laptop had a lot of data that I wanted to recover so I bought a HDD enclosure, installed the old HDD and was able to recover my lost data.
However, my new laptop has Windows 8 and I ABSOLUTELY HATE it! I'd like to revert to Windows 7 but I don't have the ability to revert from Win 8 since it's not Win 8 Pro. I also don't really want to purchase an OEM version of Win 7 particularly since I already had it on the old laptop.
The old HDD has a partition called "Recovery" which I expect has the Win 7 installation files. However, there are no files shown in File Explorer. Nonetheless, the properties show 10.4 GB used and 2.07 GB free, so I assume that the files are there but somehow hidden.
Is there any way that I can extract the Win 7 installation files from that RECOVERY drive and then install in on my new laptop?