I bought a lenovo e531 2 years ago and it shipped with windows 7 pro on it, with a windows 8 pro key embedded in the BIOS. I have since lost/misplaced the original packaging/documentation. Long story short, my windows 7 install got corrupted, and instead of trying to recover it from the recovery partition, I installed windows 10 Technical Preview and wiped out the recovery partition. It turns out that was a mistake. Now that the technical preview windows 10 is expiring, I am left without an earlier version of windows to piggyback off of to upgrade to windows 10 pro. Why Windows 10 can't just grab the windows 8 product key from the bios and be happy with that, eludes me. Anyway, I figure my only option is to download windows 8 from microsoft, upgrade to 8.1, then through that upgrade to windows 10. But wait! Downloading windows 8 requires a product key, which is encrypted in the BIOS. And it requires a previous version of windows to be installed, too. Is there any sort of way out of this conundrum, without paying for an entirely new key?
Thanks.
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