Yes. About a year ago, I received a hand-me-down PC that was choking on Windows 10. With the help of the HP Restore Partition, an SSD I wasn't using...
As I already wrote, you don't need to install Win 7 on the new drive just to create the EFI and the MSR partition.
You can create both with diskpart...
My preferred strategy is to activate early in the rebuild process. No sense wasting your time with the rest if the activation process turns out to be...
Router / modem shouldnt be the problem because rest of the devices connected to network work just fine ( both trough cable and wifi), this errors are...