Ok, I'm servicing a laptop for a friend that has a HDD on a way out. It still works, but has bunch of setor pending and it won't boot, but is still accessible via portable enclosure on USB.
I can install new drive no problem and reinstall Windows because it came with Windows 8 originally. But I don't know if it had vanilla Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or it has even updated to anything new. Because I need to install the same edition and I don't know which one it was since it wasn't my system. Is there a way to extract this data from an offline HDD ? Windows key is baked in firmware and on MS servers so that's no problem, but I need same edition it was installed last. How to do I find out what edition it was?
I can install new drive no problem and reinstall Windows because it came with Windows 8 originally. But I don't know if it had vanilla Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or it has even updated to anything new. Because I need to install the same edition and I don't know which one it was since it wasn't my system. Is there a way to extract this data from an offline HDD ? Windows key is baked in firmware and on MS servers so that's no problem, but I need same edition it was installed last. How to do I find out what edition it was?