This is from dictation.
Yes, your explanation of what you're trying to do does make sense then it makes it easier to give a meaningful reply to you.
I understand you have a computer you bought from someone else and it already has Windows 10 on it and you do not know what the key is for reinstallation.
First point. Microsoft is getting away from the use of the key as being the exclusive way to activate and installation of Windows 10. In some cases uses have been able to activate Windows 10 without actually having a product key because of a number of other circumstances. One such situation was when an update was done from Windows 7 to Windows 10. In that case a new product key was never issued. Microsoft identified the original Windows 7 installation as being valid and then activated the Windows 10 installation and assigned a code to it, but this code is not really called a product key.
For more information you would have to talk to somebody at Microsoft support, I will admit I don't clearly understand how this works.
Second point. Microsoft tends to lock Windows 10 into a specific computer based on its hardware footprint, or I should say fingerprint. In other words, the motherboard, the video card and the hard drive and some other details are used to identify a specific computer. Possibly there is something like a serial number inside the firmware. Or maybe they're using a serial number that comes from the CPU. As to whether not they actually use a serial number from the CPU, I cannot say. Someplace it was denied that's CPU serial number whenever be used for anything.
Now about using a solid-state drive. Windows can and does install onto a solid-state drive. However, I have no experience with this and do not have any worthwhile suggestions.
From my experience I am quite sure you can clone Windows 10 and the rest of your disk drive onto a new disk drive. That is not an issue. I have done this and it seems that Windows 10 tolerates the idea of being cloned to another hard drive as long as you are still using the same computer. One thing you can do, is to get the spare hard drive, even a used one, or even borrow one from a friend. Try some experiments of making a clone of your operating system onto a spare hard drive. In fact, it's not even necessary to clone the entire drive. If the operating system is on a partition and the rest of the drive is partitioned up into separate pieces, you should be able to just clone the partition that has the operating system and it should work. Of course, there are some things it might not work. On newer computers you're supposed to be using the new method of booting from firmware and not use the old MBR standard. This adds to measure of difficulty, because much of the article you might read about disk cloning and transferring operating systems has to do with the older systems that use the MBR. I'm not sure what results you might have if you have a system that insists on using the new form of disk partitioning that has been in effect for a few years.
Now here's another thing you might want to check into. It may be that your version of Windows qualifies for USB boot support. What this means is that you can get a high-quality USB drive and install a complete Windows 10 operating system onto the USB drive and actually boot from it. That can be used in place of using an installation DVD to do adjustments and repairs on your system. There are some things you would want to do from the install DVD, but you can do it justice well from having the USB drive that contains a bootable Windows 10 system.
When trying to create a bootable hard drive sometimes things go wrong. Windows may not be able to set the partition you've chosen to be bootable. In that case, Windows 10 will look for another partition that could be made bootable and will install some of the hidden files on that partition.
Now what I just said should be a warning to you that you cannot tell just by looking at files whether not a partition is bootable. It might have all the files you think should be there, even some hidden files, but is still might not be bootable. If it is not bootable, you have to have it installation DVD or a bootable USB Windows 10 installation to repair the system that will not boot.
That is about as much as I know about the subject. Two tools that will be useful to you are the ease:
first is to have some third-party program that does a good job of resizing partitions, creating new partitions and setting partitions to be either primary or logical partitions. Also, a good partition manager can also set the partition as active and also can identify or set of drive as being compatible with Windows. This usually is only needed if somebody is taken of drive and used it on a Jan UNIX system. So that point should not apply to you. Nevertheless, it is something to be aware of that there is a special mark that has to be put on a hard drive to indicate that it is compatible with Microsoft's definition of a disk operating system.
Another tool you need is a good program for making both clones and backups of any partition or even all of your desk.
The preferred tool, many users here indoors. Is a tool called Maxi him reflect. Sorry about the spelling, my voice recognition program doesn't understand what I said. Anyway here is a link to the product that I just mentioned.
https://www.macrium.com/End of dictation.
