I feel like this is a common issue and I've missed something, but I have been unable to fix it! My wife's laptop (Lenovo G550) came with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit. It got to the point a few weeks back when I decided it was probably better to reinstall from scratch. So I did a clean install on a new hard drive of Windows 7 Home Premium 64 SP1. Unfortunately the sticker with the license code had worn down to the point of not being readable. I opted to use the OpaTool to install a SLIC key. At this point her computer says it is permanently activated and everything is working great except for one thing: it won't install Windows Updates. It says "Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer." I have tried several possible solutions I've found including stopping and restarting the update service; manually removing the SoftwareDistribution directory; running windowsupdatediagnostic.diagcab, and Microsoft Fixit 50202. I am not sure what else to try. I'm suspicious that it might be an activation issue, but I have not found any references to problems like this when Windows is actually reporting that it's activated. I'd appreciate any advice anyone has.
Can you reinstall the old drive and use the Lenovo recovery media? Most portables come with some sort of on-board recovery now days. Where did you get the Windows 7 media to reinstall the OS? Are you certain it's clean and not corrupted or hacked? Just for information, why did you feel you needed to replace the HDD? You problem might be something totally different from what you suspected.
Unfortunately, no. I had replaced the original hard drive a couple years back, and didn't bother making a recovery partition. Which would have been a perfectly good decision if I had been smart enough to make a copy of the installation code from the license sticker. It's a DVD I made from an image I downloaded from Digital River a couple years back. I admit I didn't check an MD5 signature or anything like that before I installed it. It seemed to be infected or corrupted or something. If it booted it worked OK, but a lot of times it would get hung at bootup (black screen with the mouse pointer). I ran every virus/malware scanner I could get my hands on, also tried startup repair, & came to the conclusion it would be faster to reinstall. The biggest reason I went with a new disk was just to upgrade it to 750GB. As I said, it's been working fine--much better than before--except for the update issue.
That all makes sense to me. But it might be time to try new media and reinstall. I've seen corrupt downloads more often than you might think. Still, there should be a solution to your problem other than wipe and reinstall.