Upgrade to Windows 10 Pro from Windows 7

[sued2]

( am unsure if its 64 bit or 32 bit)

I bought a new mobile workstation yesterday. It has been downgraded from W10 Pro to W7. I need it to be W10 Pro. Hidden in amongst all the guff that came in the box is a warning that the BIOS settigs were changed when the downgrade occurred to boot into Legacy BIOS mode. It says that if these settings are changed to boot into native UEFI mode prior to installing W10 then various things wont work so they need to be reversed. Instructions are supposed to be on this website but I cant find themm. Frankly all of the above may as well be in Swahili for the level of understanding I have. Can anyone please tell me in plain ENglish what I have to do please?

The box came with back up discs and fortunately I have an external drive, but I'm scared to install it because of the warning above. PLease can anyone advise me? I cant even find a phone number for HP.

[WAWood]

@sued2

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

The newer PCs generally come with UEFI enabled by default; the older PCs used BIOS.  To install Win7, they probably changed the mode from UEFI to BIOS, and on that PC, that mode is likely referred to as Legacy.

That warning means that if you go into the UEFI settings and switch them from Legacy to UEFI, your PC wil no longer boot into Win7 -- but that is OK because you want to install Win10.

WIn10 will install in UEFI mode just fine -- presuming the install media is set up to handle that.

If you want to be safe, in case trying to install Win10 does hose things up, you can consider doing an image backup of your PC to an external drive, disks, or USB stick PRIOR to making any changes.

My suggestion is you consider using a third-party solution known as Macrium Reflect (MR).

I prefer to use third-party recovery solutions for the following reasons:
1) More flexibility and reliabilty -- can make recovery media as often as you like, not restricted to one attempt, which if it fails, then you are stuck.
2) More media options -- can create media in DVD, USB stick, or external drive format
3) Mounting option -- can "mount" the save images as virtual "drives" and extract individual files and folders
4) WinPE boot option -- can install a special boot option that allows you to boot to recovery information and do a repair or restore from there -- when Windows will not boot

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive, USB stick, or DVDs
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

NOW that you have a means to recover the PC,  I would then just change the setting, insert the first Win10 disk and see if it installs.

Good Luck