Reinstall my OS

[CHHCFC]

My HP Pavilion is 10 years old.  It originally came with 8 gigs of memory, one 1 TB drive and Win 10.  I upped the memory to 16 gigs, and I added a second 1 TB hard drive. 

According to HP & MS, my laptop is capable of running Win 11.  After a typical Windows update session, the system asked me again if I wanted to upgrade to Win 11 and I finally said "Go" to said upgrade.  Needless to say, the system crashed during the upgrade and became unbootable.  I tried any number of recovery options, standard Windows and otherwise (Lazesoft, etc.), but I had no luck.  As part of the attempted recovery, I pulled the second drive and stripped the machine to the bare minimum. As an aside, my second drive still had all my data on it, so I didn't really lose anything in that respect. 

So now, I just want to install a fresh copy of Win 11 if I can and start over.  I've never done this before with this machine, and I don't have any of my original packaging, disks or whatever (in fact, this laptop doesn't have a cd drive anyway).  I assume I need to install from a USB drive, and I will need to set the machine up to look for said USB drive as part of the boot process.  I've downloaded a "current" copy of Win 11 from MS, so I think I'm ready to go.  If someone could give me a "step-by-step" for reinstalling the OS, with a heads-up for any potential missteps (example; do I need a lic number?), I would appreciate it (or point me towards any posts/articles doing the same thing).  I've built plenty of systems, but it's been quite some time since I did one, and never a laptop with Win 11.  Any help is appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Installing W11 is pretty much the same as installing W10.

Here's a step by step video:

How to Install Windows 11 (Step by Step Guide)

You don't need a product key.  W11 will detect the product key in your PC's BIOS

To get to the boot options menu in your PC, have the W11 USB flash drive in one of your notebook's USB ports.

This information is different than what is explained in the video.

Turn on or restart the PC.

Immediately tap...tap...tap the ESC key to get the menu of options.

Select the F9 boot options menu and from that, select the (U)EFI flash drive and press the Enter key.

The PC should boot from the USB flash drive.

After W11 has completed installing, if you need any drivers or software, you should be able to use the W10 drivers/software on your notebook's support page.

HP Pavilion - 15-cw1063wm Software and Driver Downloads | HP® Support