Technical Articles and Blog Content

A deleted StackOverflow.com answer - resurrected here.

A quick "best effort, bare minimum approach" since most developers may need to deal with this - at least for their home computers - and it is a huge waste of time for all of us.

Are you in acute need of recovering your system, or do you just want a system backup (for later)?

I will assume the first (second issue below the divider line):

Reinstall Windows

1. Recovery Partition : There might be a  recovery partition  hidden on your disk which will do the task for you auto-magically when invoked right. Various ways to trigger such a recovery depending on the PC vendor.

   • You must backup all your files as the recovery will wipe everything out .

   • Best real-world advice, if you haven't done this before, would be to get on the phone with a computer-savvy friend to give you a quick start or a few heads-ups. They may accept payment in Tequila, Red-wine, iTunes gift cards etc... :-).

   • Maybe launch  diskmgmt.msc  to see what is on your disk. Check your  PC vendor's web site for recovery instructions, or the  retail store  where you bought it.

2. Download ISO : I believe  you can also download the official Windows ISO images from Microsoft upon entering a valid license key .

   • This download link is different for each region. Here is the generic one that should redirect you to your localized ISO version (in other words your language version of Windows):  https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows7.

   • For the English version specifically:  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows7.

   • On the issue of creating a bootable USB:  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49466983/how-to-boot-windows-7-activator-with-uefi/49471334#49471334 ( The Windows USB/DVD Download Tool ).

   • Then you simply reinstall Windows the regular way ( backup all your files ).

   • Here is some information on retrieving your license key . I like to use the VBScript option to retrieve the license key without any external software, but I haven't tested that particular script or the linked content in general. Looks OK though. So essentially your license key is either in  firmware , on a  sticker on the computer , or  retrievable from the registry  (or all of the above - perhaps).

Image Backup & Recovery

System Image : If what you want is just a  backup image of your whole system  (which should also be possible to recover as a working system provided your system isn't already broken), you could use those imaging tools such as  Ghost  (not sure if it is even available anymore -  looks like there is a replacement suite ) and whatever new is on the block.  I haven't done this kind of work in years  -  and shouldn't try to answer this question - if I had any sense :-) .

• Disc cloning

• Comparison of disk cloning software

• http://clonezilla.org/  (untested by me, mentioned here and there)

• https://www.symantec.com/products/ghost-solutions-suite

A deleted StackOverflow.com answer - resurrected here.

This isn't something I do every day to say the least, and the topic is more suited for serverfault.com or superuser.com as mentioned in my comment above.

However, it seems formatting the USB key as FAT32 and extracting the ISO onto the FAT32 partition is good enough: Making a Windows 10 install USB. EFI apparently needs no special boot sectors just a FAT32 partition and the \efi\boot\boot[arch].efi loader (see link).

This matches Microsoft's own documenation on the subject: Install Windows from a USB Flash Drive. Quote: "...select the FAT32 file system to be able to boot either BIOS-based or UEFI-based PCs".

This is probably the same for Windows 7, but no guarantees. I would probably go for the The Windows USB/DVD Download Tool.

Also mentioning Windows 10's MediaCreationTool.exe documentation, and the tool itself.

And cross-linking a similar answer I wrote yesterday (for reference and easy retrieval): How to Create an ISO Image from my Installed Windows.

Technology mind maps below. Other mind maps here.

All Stackoverflow answers.

Below are some selected answers from stackoverflow.com, serverfault.com and superuser.com

• WiX Quick Start Link Collection
• Various ways to uninstall an MSI
• How can I find the product GUID of an installed MSI setup?
• About the tool WiX and also about the Complexity of Deployment
• What does deployment really entail? What do deployment specialists actually do?
• Windows Installer Transforms and about MSI anti-patterns

• Auto-GUIDs and settings file deployment
• How to deploy settings files successfully with MSI
• Flagging when to do re-copy of per user files
• Why is it a good idea to limit deployment of files to the user-profile or HKCU when using MSI?
• Application Launch Sequence
• Creating content folders per-user
• Make WIX installer place files in AppData
• Flagging changes done per machine for per user refresh

• Do not override the existing file when we install the .exe file
• Windows Installer Self-Repair - the scourge of society!

• How to find the product GUID for installed MSI files
• Dealing with write access denied for applications and deployment files
• How to deploy files with write access
• Writing to HKLM
• ActiveSetup
• Why you should avoid MSI for registry settings tweaking

Links to various deployment tools vendors and some links to tool reviews.

• Advanced Installer
• Installshield
• WiX Toolset
• Pace Suite
• Microsoft (VS Installer Projects)

• Quick Tool Overview
• Detailed Tool Comparison
• Current Technology Developments
• Multi Platform Installers

• Non-MSI Installer Tools
• Windows Installer Tools
• Sys-Admin Tools for Deployment