Windows 8 makes it impossible to recover/reinstall. Thanks Microsoft.

Cliff notes: New ASUS with external optical drive (see my sig), dual SSD's with a Recovery partition. I screwed up my partitions resizing them so the recovery partition is useless.

Now you can purchase and download a Windows 8 upgrade CD, however it will not let you install it (or change product keys) as the product key is located in the BIOS and is automatically accessed when reinstalling. So many (including mine) laptops are coming with Windows 8 Home Premium installed and more are using internal partitions as recovery.

Microsoft was on the phone with me for about 2 hours and eventually they gave me a second product key and told me to download W8 again. No luck. It continually says that the product key does not match the media.

Maybe I'm missing something here. With some short background reading it appears that Microsoft has gone through much trouble to lock down the whole illegal installation thing.

Please tell me someone has advice. I really don't want to send this thing to ASUS and get it back in a month!

 

There's two versions of 8. Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro. Did you download the regular 8 disc or the pro disc? Also didn't your computer come with a Windows 8 reinstallation disc or they stopped doing that with 8? It is also possible the key they gave you could be for the opposite edition of windows 8.

 

Many computers are coming with recovery partitions (taking up valuable ssd space!) instead of dedicated DVD's. Makes sense though since many of these don't even have optical drives, such as mine. But it really leaves you screwed if you have a hard drive failure.

I downloaded the pro, I believe it's the only one available from Microsoft right now.

I'm wondering if I could do a W7 install and upgrade directly from that, but that embedded product key in the BIOS is killing me.

 

why don't you do a clean install and use the second key they gave you? you admit that the recovery partition is hosed anyway. recovery and reinstallation aren't necessarily interchangeable.

Sent from my Windows 8 device using Board Express Pro

 

Windows 8 offers an upgrade license(inexpensive) as well as a System Builder license(expensive). The upgrade license requires an existing OS to begin with (Or may not activate). The System Builder license does not require any exiting OS to begin with.

Your best bet is to try and salvage the recovery partition. Maybe if you can access the recovery partition, you could use imagex to reimage the C: drive. And then if you want to upgrade to Windows 8, you may do the same later. Alternatively, you may perform a clean installation of supported Windows versions for Windows 8 upgrade and then upgrade later as well. But, as far as I know, you cannot use a upgrade license key to perform a clean windows 8 installation on a new machine.

 

The disc you have is probably OEM and the key MS gave you is retail.

 

you can use upgrade media to perform a clean install. i'm not sure i can recall any versions of windows where this hasn't been the case, so long as you have a legitimate product key.

 

I just got it working. It seems that the keys are extremely specific for the version of Windows 8. This wouldn't be an issue if the activation process didn't automatically take the key directly from the Bios. So the way around it was installing W7 first, and then installing W8 Pro upgrade while still in W7.

I did try using ImageX and the recovery WIM file was corrupted, sadly.

Now the only thing left to figure out is how to safely move the system partition (350mb) to a different partition, it hogged my 70gb storage partition and ignored the 600 mb one!

 

That's an attribute of windows in general, not specific to Windows 8. If you end up too frustrated- there are other operating system options out there.

 

Yeah, IIRC there were like 10+ different versions of Windows XP Pro - retail, upgrade, royalty OEM, volume license, system builder, etc. - each of which had different activation rules and procedures in place...

 

I bought an Samsung Win8 Notebook, it normal for me when i get a new notebook to remove the hdd and make an image of it using Acronis 2012 to my 2TB external before i even turn on the notebook for the first time, the backup size is normal 30-40gb and i have done this for at least 20 notebooks with not problems.

With my first Win8 Hdd, Acronis 2012 seems to make an backup without a problem, lets say a 500gb hdd to an 500gb hdd, it keeps asking me what to do with the partitions as if it`s confused, i have tried a dozen times and i cannot do a clone

John

 

Acronis screwed my Windows 8 installation, after a lot of digging around, it seems MS has changed the mbr image in windows 8. I found a freebie called Clonezilla that images harddrives very well and works for Windows 8. It's a small live linux imaging platform, give it a go it was the only thing that worked for me.

 

easeus todo bu works fine (here) with w8, have been shuffling hd and ssd content\partitons around many laptops lately, + doing complete images and restores, no problems, aligns for ssd when restoring.

 

yes..................