Restoring Windows 7 after failed upgrade to Windows 10

I wanted to upgrade an old laptop running Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 but the in place upgrade wouldn't work. (Not completely sure why, it just put up a dialog box saying Windows 10 Upgrade Failed after it got about 75% through.) In desperation I tried a clean install of Windows 10 which worked but resulted in an OS which wasn't activated. I don't have the activation key for Windows 7 so I can't use it to activate Windows 10.

Before attempting the upgrade I saved a full Windows 7 system image and I would now like to restore this, to return the computer to the state it was in before the upgrade. I imagined I would be able to do this from Windows 10 but I can't find a way to point Windows 10 to the Windows 7 image.

Can anyone advise me on how to do this?

Thanks.

With what program did you created the Win 7 drive image?

Please edit your profile with ALL your hardware specs. Use System two. It will help us to help you
System Info - See Your System Specs

Once you have Win 7 back you can retrieve the activation on a file to be used to activate a Win 10 clean install.
Clean Install Windows 10 Directly without having to Upgrade First | Tutorials

@SIW2
Thanks for the advice. I downloaded a Windows 7 ISO and booted the machine from that. There was a Repair option which enabled me to load my system image without having to do an install of Windows 7 first, which was great.
The machine is now back in the state it was.
@Megahertz07
Thanks for the pointer to the tutorial on clean install of Windows 10. It specifies a method for transferring the product information from the old Windows 7 system to Windows 10 without knowing the product key, which I will try out today.

@simonc8, did you succeed?

Hi Megahertz07, thanks for getting back.

Unfortunately it hasn't worked (yet). I've clean installed Windows 10, copied the genuineticket.xml file to the correct folder, rebooted but Windows 10 didn't activate. When I looked for the genuineticket.xml file it had been deleted. I copied it over again and rebooted again, but still no activation.

I'm going to try again with internet disconnected in case there is some activation query traffic which is preventing the file being used.

Do you have any other thoughts?

Thanks

- - - Updated - - -

Booting with internet disconnected didn't help. Not sure what to try next...

The file definitely gets deleted each time I reboot - I've tried it several times.

The installed version is 21H2 and there doesn't seem to be an update available for 22H2. That might be because I've had to install 32-bit Windows 10 because the laptop originally had 32-bit Windows 7 installed (not sure why, as it is a 64-bit machine...). According to advice from the internet if I can get 32-bit Windows 10 to activate I can then do a clean install of 64-bit Windows 10, which is what I ultimately want, and it will activate.

Do you think there is any chance that I could go straight to a clean install of 64-bit Windows 10 and use the genuine ticket method to activate it?

can you run this, lets have a look at your product key....
in reality the key, provided its Retail, should be acceptable for either a clean or reinstall, is still valid

https://www.sevenforums.com/attachme...ns-mgadiag.exe