Reinstallation issues

Hello

I honestly don't know if this is the right place but I'm really desperate for answers.
Yesterday I formatted my HDD but I'm a really silly person and did this by plugging it into a desktop pc so I could move some important files over and formatted it in the same PC. I plugged it into my laptop again and now it tries to boot and tells me the installation had crashed and that I needed to reboot. This keeps looping.

I tried booting from the installation DVD but it won't do that. I asked the IT guy at my school, he told me to download the OEM version of windows 8 (because this is apperantly the version that this moddel has a license for) but I honestly don't see how that would make a difference seeing as my laptop won't read the DVD that is in the drive and even then I can't find a download that isn't on an incredibly dodgey site.

I was also told that I need to boot from the recovery partition or something but as we've established, I'm an idiot and I might have gotten rid of my recovery partition during the format.

Any help would be appreciated, I need this laptop for school work aswell.

 

I moved this to the Windows forum since it had its place there. You should check in your BIOS if you can disable secure boot and enable "legacy options", that should allow you to boot from DVD. You don't need an OEM version of Windows for it to successfully install, all you need is the install media for your version of windows (7, 8 or 8.1), the Windows 8 key is embedded in the BIOS and it should activate itself.

If you need a way to download the right version of Windows, we should be able to point you to a legit download of the right version that will activate with your license key.

 

If you have a Win8 OEM system you first need to go to the UEFI bios and in there change that to Legacy BIOS to be able to format it to Win7 O/S to install.

Also look here

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825112.aspx

or from PCmag

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417361,00.asp

 

Get it direct from Windows? http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media

 

First of all factory installed Win 8 computer should probably come with 3 or more different partitions (boot, win 8 and recovery). I don't know how you formatted it on the other computer, but if you just hook it up, copy files and simply format, the recovery and boot partition should still be there intact. There should be some key combination on your computer, that will let you get into recovery and reinstall factory set up. If recovery and boot partitions got corrupted (for example WinXp doesn't know about shadow copy and will erase those), then go to BIOS change to legacy boot and choose DVD as first boot up drive and follow from there as others already pointed it out, but I have a feeling your recovery and boot partitions are still there, unless you went into partitions and deleted them first, before formatting.