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How to reinstall over a corrupt Windows 7 upgrade
Hi
I bought an Acer laptop last year for my wife, which had an OEM install of Vista. There were no recovery disks but on first use the machine prompted me to burn some sort of backup disks, which I duly did.
Later I applied for the free Windows 7 upgrade disk which I installed as an upgrade from within Vista, leaving all the preinstalled programs and what have you intact.
All was well for a few months but yesterday it crashed and Windows wouldnt boot up again.
None of the repair options worked so in the end I tried Ubuntu from a dvd which worked fine and (thank goodness) enabled me to rescue some files I hadnt backed up. So as far as I can see the hdd is alright.
I dont know how to proceed reinstalling a Windows OS though, and am worried about invalidating my product key.
Can I just put the Windows 7 upgrade disk in and instruct the machine to load from this at startup or wont this work?
I have whatever the rescue disks were the machine made me create when first used but understand from reading about that these Vista ones will now be invalid.
Many thanks
toast