Friend's laptop does not boot.

[The Law]

He was having some issue with his computer after recovering from a virus and it ended up with his windows store being gone (windows 8). Some things were going wrong so we were like update to 8.1 and since the windows store was the only way he did a factory reset. Turns out that windows 8 had lost itself some files and was no longer able to successfully boot. The error message is that windows cannot install successfully and we don't know what to do. My other friends have recommended a new hard drive and then just put windows 7 on it ( i have another lying around). Would this work, or is there an easier option?

[Vacsol]

take the HDD out, put it into another PC and back up the files

then, format the drive and do a fresh windows 8 install.

[The Law]

take the HDD out, put it into another PC and back up the files

then, format the drive and do a fresh windows 8 install.

All of his files were backed up before the factory reset so now just format and install windows?

[Vacsol]

All of his files were backed up before the factory reset so now just format and install windows?

make sure they're backed up onto another HDD, then go ahead.

 

[The Law]

make sure they're backed up onto another HDD, then go ahead.

 

his disk has 5 partitions and unallocated space, where do we install windows, would it be partition 4 that says primary?