TR Forums

Hello,

Wife brought home a friends laptop for my to look at, won't boot or anything, I was going to use my win8 disk to reformat, but there is no product key.
Then I googled and found this
http://www.dell.com/support/troubleshoo ... cid=590806

So I guess I will have to get the dell discs from them.

Are all win8 laptops like this or only Dell??

What if you wanted to put in an SSD later on? (would the dell cd work?)

You can actually use any Win8 disc to install, and it should pull the key from the BIOS. It's a Microsoft thing, not a Dell thing. The only place you'll run into problems is if you want to exercise your downgrade rights.

i'd also go looking for an app that will report the product key and write it down. not sure if anyone has done one for Win8 yet.

Ethyriel wrote:

You can actually use any Win8 disc to install, and it should pull the key from the BIOS. It's a Microsoft thing, not a Dell thing. The only place you'll run into problems is if you want to exercise your downgrade rights.

Do consumer editions of Windows 8 HAVE downgrade rights? Only Pro uses do AND it gets complicated:

http://www.microsoft.com/OEM/en/licensi ... rights.asp

Basically you need pro and you have to obtain it somehow, which basically means paying your OEM $10-20 for the Disk anc Key. Getting Vista ones is a gitantic pain in the BUTT from Dell and HP. Levenovo is actually quite pleasant about the whole affair.

Arvald wrote:

i'd also go looking for an app that will report the product key and write it down. not sure if anyone has done one for Win8 yet.

Indeed, however the laptop won't even boot. Guess I will try using the oem disc to try a repair and see what happens.

So if you updated the BIOS and it got corrupted that could possibly mess up the windows 8 product key also?

The Key is in a protected portion of the BIOS, so it cannot normally be written to. It's similar to the ESID on a typical phone, normal people cannot write to it.

I got some HP machines for work recently with Win8 Pro downgraded to Win7 Pro. As with the OP, no Windows CoA anymore on the machines. I guess it's all SLP/SLIC/OA 3.0 based now. If I have to reinstall I guess I just hope the OEM discs work in case my Win7 Pro MOLP image doesn't.

That's the wonderful thing about having these suckers TOTALLY associated with the hardware. I guess.

It sucks, because I need to deploy everything with an inhouse image per policy. Luckily we're nonprofit, and get Pro licenses for something like $12, but only 50 per year.

Well, that shouldn't be an issue? If the new hardware has the stuff in the BIOS, Windows should activate just fine for the OEM stuff, I'd think. I mean, I've restored some HP business desktops from their recovery CDs before and I don't type in any key nor does it go online to activate like the XP machines I've done before.

If you're using an inhouse image, does that mean you're using a volume licensed image anyway? It shouldn't care, you just need to manage your activations and all that jazz. I'm not too familiar with the horror that is MS licensing so probably someone else can better answer this question for you.

IF you are using VLK, you either are using KMS and so you are fine, or you are using MAK and you are fine. The OEM Win7 image has some nasty licensing about mass deployment. That's why you get SA on all of your machine and don't worry about any of that.

If we weren't a broke non-profit it wouldn't matter, but we skirt the rules and use the OEM keys where possible. Getting VLK's and a KMS up and running is one of my early priorities when I take over.