Assistance with my pre-installed Windows

[deviusone11]

Bought a toshiba satellite C75D-B7215 that came with no discs whatsoever, and my hard drive crashed. I bought a new hard drive and was told that since my Windows was pre-installed (in my bios or motherboard or something) that all I would need to do was insert new hdd and it would automatically put my Windows back on it. That didn't work, still getting "no bootable device" message yet my hdd is listed now in BIOS. (Wasn't before, how I knew last hdd crashed) Anyone know what I would need to do to get this working? Step by steps are always helpful as I'm not exactly computer smart.. Thanks in advance.

 

[clutchc]

Was this Win7 or Win8? If Win7 and you have the product key, you can download the .ISO file for the installation disk here and use it to burn yourself a Win7 installation disk. You can also make a bootable flash drive if you have no optical drive.
http/www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-recovery

(Btw, The old HDD had the Win recovery partition on it. If the old HDD is dead, so is your recovery partition)

 

[USAFRet]

1. You can't download the relevant OS from tha above linked site. That does not work with an OEM license.

2. What should have happened, is that when the PC was new, you created a recovery set of DVD's from whatever function has for doing that.
This would have allowed you to put that initial factory load on a whole new drive.
But since that did not happen...moving on...

3. You have 2 options:
Buy a recovery set from Toshiba, and bring it back to out of the box condition
or
Buy your own OS and install that.

 

[USAFRet]

Whoever told you "since my Windows was pre-installed (in my bios or motherboard or something) that all I would need to do was insert new hdd and it would automatically put my Windows back on it"

...was completely wrong.
Do not listen to that person again.

 

[deviusone11]

It was Windows 8, and I have the old hard drive still but I assume I can't still get the recovery thing.. Pretty sure it's dead. How much does the recovery set from toshiba cost you think? Will it be a pain like sending in laptop, or would it be easier to just buy new Windows?

 

[USAFRet]

It was Windows 8, and I have the old hard drive still but I assume I can't still get the recovery thing.. Pretty sure it's dead. How much does the recovery set from toshiba cost you think? Will it be a pain like sending in laptop, or would it be easier to just buy new Windows?

The recovery thing from Toshiba would probably be cheaper than a full copy of Windows. But that's because it comes with all that original bloatware.

 

[clutchc]

@ USAFRet
You are 100% correct. That link for downloading a .ISO file doesn't work for OEMs. And the old Digital River download site doesn't work anymore either. Bummer. Good thing I saved my Win7 .ISO files from previously.

 

[clutchc]

UPDATE: I found this German mirror site that still has the downloadable .ISO files for Win7. I just downloaded the Win7x64 .ISO file and ran both a virus scan and a Malwarebytes scan on the file. Appears to be clean. But it sounds like the site is about to be changed to a torrent soon.
http/mirror.corenoc.de/digitalrivercontent.net/

 

[madmatt30]

I am fairly sure you can use a OEM key here
http/windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/upgrade-product-key-only

I did just before Xmas for my little lenovo tiny-pc