Right tools for the Job?

[Tahuhali]

Friend's computer stopped working, asked me to look at it.
Took me about 2 minutes to decide the HDD had failed. the machine is one of those all-in-one PCs (neither a laptop nor a desktop, but I guess the thing does sit on a desk?) it's a Lenovo bought from who knows where and never been opened up. Its 1T hard Drive shipped with Windows 8, and shortly after it was available was upgraded to Windows 10.
So, what my objective with it now it to at a minimum recover the data off of it, and at best replace the HDD with a fresh install of windows 10 for him and replace everything so it was working as it was before. the BIOS on the thing don't seem to like booting from an optical drive, so I would need to boot from a USB stick.
What would you all recommend as the best recovery OS to boot from? I used to use UBCD but I can't find a tutorial that works with Windows 10 yet.

 

[carnageX]

Just throw a Ubuntu on a bootable flash drive, and boot off of it to recover files. May have to disable SecureBoot in the EFI/BIOS if it doesn't allow you to boot from the Linux flash drive.

After that, you can use MS's Media Creation Tool for Win10 and put it on the flash drive and install Win10 directly and it should activate fine since it was already previously activated.

 

[Tahuhali]

I have worked with Ubuntu a little before, using for that didn't cross my mind. Haven't used MS's Media Creation Tool before, ill have to look into it. Thanks!

 

[Tahuhali]

After that, you can use MS's Media Creation Tool for Win10 and put it on the flash drive and install Win10 directly and it should activate fine since it was already previously activated.

So I found the page on Microsoft's website and it said:
"On the Enter the product key to activate Windows page, enter your product key. The product key should be in a purchase confirmation email if you bought Windows 10."
but I don't have any such email and I don't believe my friend does either. is there some application I can run from Ubuntu to see what the product key the machine has? I remember using such a program years ago but I don't recall what it was.

 

[carnageX]

So I found the page on Microsoft's website and it said:
"On the Enter the product key to activate Windows page, enter your product key. The product key should be in a purchase confirmation email if you bought Windows 10."
but I don't have any such email and I don't believe my friend does either. is there some application I can run from Ubuntu to see what the product key the machine has? I remember using such a program years ago but I don't recall what it was.

If you did the Win8 -> Win10 upgrade (or your friend, rather) then you don't need to enter in a product key. it should activate after install when it connects to the internet, as Win10 upgrades go off of a hardware ID that was generated during the upgrade.

With the newer ISO's of Win10, I believe you can also enter in the Win8.1 product key, from the COA sticker.