Does Changing Hard Drive Affect Windows 8 Activation
Dec 16, 2012
A while back, I changed the internal drive in my laptop and restored Windows 8 using the recovery tools on the installation DVD. After reboot, windows was still activated and everything was working fine. Then I resized and moved the partition on the same new drive and activation was still ok.
I just tried a slmgr.vbs /ato and Windows got de-activated!
Edit: Tried re-activating but failed with an error code, then tried phone activation, got a confirmation id but when I clicked next in the activation wizard it said not genuine.
I had to restore a backup of my data.dat file from Linux and my activation came back.
Is this normal?
I am using Windows 8 Professional x86 and added the free Media center Pack.
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Aug 8, 2013
I've changed interface language of Windows 8 to English but parts of the system (including default Metro Apps, like Mail) are still in the language Windows was originally installed with.
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Feb 18, 2014
I have an Inspiron 14Z 5423, and my hard drive crashed, after running the dell diagnostic tool, it pops up an error code 2000-0142 when it starts analyzing the hard drive, but despite this, i can still access the hard drive using Ubuntu Live DVD ...
Any ways, i noticed there is a second hard drive/partition of 32 GO which i think is supposed to contain the OS image or something similar, so if i buy a new hard drive, could i recover my original windows OS ?!
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Jun 30, 2014
I have 2 hard drives and 1 is a lot bigger than the main one. I was wondering if I changed them around would my computer run faster and how I would go about doing this, what I mean is make my larger hard drive my default disk C if possible? [URL] ....
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Sep 15, 2014
Changing entire ownership of entire hard drive any risks etc ?
I am using method of
Right click entire hdd
Properties
Security
Advanced
Change owner
Advanced
Find now
Name - In Folder
Users - Computername(mine is for example Furkan)
Ok this makes me even able to enter inside of System Volume Information folder
For example if i format windows can i still access these harddisks without any problem ?
Are there any details, detailed information, article about ownership of files / folders on windows 8 ?
Windows 8.1 x64
Also changing windows having driver - boot driver ownership from Trustedinstaller to user would cause any problem ?
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Oct 14, 2013
I want to reset my Windows 8 system but I have a question.
I've made a seperate partition (acts like a backup for situations like this). This partition stores my music, pics, documents etc.
If I reset Windows 8 will it also affect this partition, or just the partition where the OS is installed?
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Mar 5, 2013
I'm booting off my SSD which is drive C: and I have games and programs on an extra hard drive which was origanally drive H: but after a restart it switched to I: and when I go into Disk Management to change it Drive H: isn't there.
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Dec 26, 2012
I have a 2TB Western Digital My Book Essentials, it's filled with tons of old photos, movies, docs, games, and I'm scared to think of what else. The SATA to USB connector broke on it, so I took the drive apart and put it inside my computer. I opened up device manager because it wasn't showing up automatically and the 2TB is showing up as unallocated, I'm freaking out now because I'm scared the data was somehow deleted.What do I do?
edit: I realize also this isn't directly related to Windows 8 (besides the fact it's the OS I'm on), but I don't know where else to post it. I'd also like to say that I had a really deep feeling the drive was going to break continually for about two weeks before it happened, so if you have a similar feeling about something, don't ignore it!
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Jun 22, 2014
Can you save to hard drive and One Drive at Same Time?
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Jul 10, 2013
I know there is good software out there to clone/image my hard drive and restore it to a new SSD drive. I'm just wondering though, since my laptop is brand new, I made a full recovery to a USB drive and included the OEM recovery partition.
Couldn't I just swap out the old HDD with the new SSD and boot with the recovery stick and do a full recovery back to the new SSD?
Also, however I do this, recover or image backup/restore, do I need to do some type of SSD alignment? I can't find a clear answer on that.
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Apr 16, 2013
I have an SSD drive with 2 partitions on it. 1st partition has Win 7 on it as drive letter C. 2nd Partition has Win 8 on it as Drive letter W. At 1 point in time if I booted to Win 8 the drive letter would dynamically change from drive letter W to Drive letter C and make Win 7 drive letter W. The revers was true if I booted to Win 7. Something has changed somewhere, where this dynamic drive letter changing is no longer working. When I boot to Win 8 the drive letter remains to be drive letter W & Win 7 is still drive C. This is causing problems when I'm booted to Win 8 with regard to installing & using apps while in Win 8 since the C drive is really the Win 7 system drive.
How can I fix this to get back the dynamic flip flopping of drive C? I confess to being somewhat ignorant when dealing with this particular area of things.
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Dec 29, 2013
I am new to Windows 8, and first time with a laptop. I have 1tb hard drive (minus a few gb) in c drive. d drive is being used as recovery
This is how it was setup. What I would like to do is to partition the amount of space i have from c drive into another drive.
Can manage to partition some hard drive space over to another driver letter, if i do a fresh install of windows, will this new drive be formatted too?
(Just asking this because when I owned a desktop computer, I had two drives. A c-drive and a d-drive. When I re-installed windows 7 on the desktop, all my files were still available on the d-drive, hence asking the above last question).
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May 16, 2013
A few months ago my laptop broke and it needed repairs. The HDD was replaced and i got my laptop back with one new HDD inside and one "broke" HDD in a bag. Later the "Repaired" Laptop crashed again so i bought a new one and took the HDD out of the old laptop. I bought a HDD case with USB connection and both of the HDD's where intact. The oldest HDD contained windows 7 and the replaced contained windows 8. Now i want to sell the Windows 8 HDD so i want it to be clean of personal files but i want it to keep windows 8. I thought the solution was to run the windows 8 on the HDD so i can use the program deletation program of that windows 8. The problem is i dont know how to run windows 8 of a hard drive. I have searched the internet but with no success.
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Aug 23, 2014
My wife just got a new PC running Windows 8.1 Pro and she wants to re-connect her external hard drive that has all her game files on it to the new PC.
While the new PC recognizes the drive it states that it needs to be initialized , doing so would wipe the data currently on the drive which would be unacceptable. How to get the new PC to recognize this drive and its data?
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Aug 18, 2014
I have just tried to Refresh my Windows 8.1 installation, but when running the refresh Windows 8.1 came up with an error I have not seen before, let alone do the refresh.
It displayed a message saying "The Drive is Locked, you will have to unlock the drive to continue" so HOW do you unlock a Hard Drive?
How to do this before I either pull my hair out, or start from scratch and re-format the drive and do a complete new install of Windows 8.1
One thing I have done about a week ago which may be causing this problem is I converted the Drive from MBR to GPT and if this has locked the drive.
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Sep 19, 2013
I have just bought a 4TB external USB 3.0 hard drive. The plan is to copy all of the data from my current internal 2TB drive to the 4TB, then I'm going to crack the case of the external hard drive open, take the drive out, and put it in my PC to replace the 2TB drive that's in there now (which I know will void the warranty). This isn't going to be a boot drive as I have an SSD for that.
I had read that Windows does not support large drives of this size and that it would show up as 2 partitions, so I was prepared to convert the drive to GPT in order to have 1 large partition. However, I connected the drive up to my Windows 8.1 machine and it shows as 1 large partition of 3.63TB, which is about what I expected.
Does this mean I don't have to convert the drive after all? Can I do what I'm planning to do and everything will work fine? Or do I need to convert it to GPT before I copy all of my data over and if so, how do I do that exactly?
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Feb 22, 2013
My pc got stuck on a black screen after i restart it one time. When it finally lets me log in after turning the computer on and off manually, all of my programs were deleted, i couldn't access my computer's hard drive(?)(c:windows) , and i couldn't access system restore (or msconfig / any of the advance system tools). Any other way to do a full system restore without any of the pre mentioned options?
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Apr 2, 2013
I have recently purchased and new computer with Windows 8. It's running smoothly, however I am encountering one particular problem.
My primary boot device is a 128GB SSD and obviously I want that space for the operating system install and some essential programs (photoshop, fireworks etc.).
My secondary device is a standard 1TB HDD. This is what I want to be my storage space for files, documents and non-essential programs.
The problem - Whenever I try to install a program to my second drive it comes up with the following error
"Error Writing to D:lahblahlahlah.xml. Verify that you have access to that directory"
I have check my permissions in the security tab and made sure that all the right check boxes are clicked. I have made sure to run the program as administrator and I've check to make sure that the directory is not set to 'read only'.
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Apr 12, 2013
I successfully managed to create a virtual hard drive on my external drive to try boot windows 8 off it. I managed to boot it up and the login screen also appears as normal. I have a successful login, But on the second time login I am faced with black screen and the cursor. I'm aware that Microsoft has released a fix for this. I have attached the executable in the zip. I tried running this fix but it didn't work . After the black screen appears, even in safe mode I cannot run explorer.exe or open any folder to try running any executable files
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Mar 7, 2013
My 60 GB C: drive ran out of room. The only thing installed on it is Windows 8 and whatever pre-installed programs came with my computer. I ran WinDirStat (WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics), a directory statistic tool and found two very large folders: C:/Windows is 22.2 GB and C:/ProgramData/Microsoft is 17.2 GB. This doesn't seem right. Can I free up room in these or are they both necessary? I read that windows 8 should take up around 20 GB, not 40 so how might I got about freeing up some space?
Also, I updated from Windows 7 about two months ago.
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Jun 25, 2013
Well, since i installed Windows 8 Pro on my desktop, it already ate 26,8GB of disk space. I have no extra apps installed (posting this from Internet Explorer 10). How can i free some of that space?
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Jul 24, 2014
I had been using my Dell Inspiron 15R 5521 with the factory installed Windows 8 Single Language version with a 1 TB Hard Drive. Its been over an year, i have been using it.
I used to install my programs in the C: Drive and separate my project related files, mp3s, etc in the D: drive so should their be any virus attack or anything unexpected, i could just format the C: Drive and have all my applications re-installed, which is no big deal for me.
Yesterday I had a very unexpected thing go down. My laptop started acting funny, it started restarted on its own over and over again and goes to the big blue screen notifiying me that the laptop had to be restarted.
Since i was under notion my D: Drive is safe, and the worse thing that could happen would a virus attack on the C: drive, i decided to refresh my PC because it was doing all sorts of weird stuff.
After refreshing my PC, I lost the entire D: drive.
Right now, my D: drive is my DVD drive. I can't figure out how to recover the other drive and its files. My Refreshing i had taken a backup as requested by the wizard but i couldnt view what all files are being taken as backup.
Looks like, it has only taken the backup of my C: Drive.
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Nov 28, 2012
I just bought a lenovo Z580 with windows 8 and I also have a new hard drive coming. The first thing I tried to do was create factory restore disks so that when the new hard drive gets here I can remove the old hard drive and replace it with the new one and put the pre-installed windows 8 that came with the laptop on it. I can't however find a way to create factory restore disks. Is this still possible and if not what are my options for replacing a hard drive for this laptop and using the same windows install that originally came with it? I would prefer to not have to clone the hard drive because the new hard drive is an SSD so I will want to install windows with AHCI mode on.
Ultimately, I want to do a clean install of windows 8 on the new laptop using the existing pre-installed windows 8 key. I imagine this would be pretty simple if I had windows 8 install discs but I don't have those either as they didn't come with the laptop. what my options are to make this work?
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May 16, 2014
I am running Windows 8.1 and it appears that my hard drive needs to be replaced. When the machine is turned on, frequently there is a slight screech and I feel it's best to replace the hard drive.
How do I make an exact bootable copy of the hard drive on a new hard drive and simply replace the drive with the new drive without having to reinstall Windows 8.1 or other programs and without affecting any of the files currently on the machine? If cloning software is required, are there any free programs I can download?
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Feb 7, 2013
I've created a "Powered on machine" virtual installation of my Windows 8 on VMware VCentre Convertor to run in VMware Player, the size of the Hard drive was about 130GB, in the virtual machine I've deleted all my media files and uninstalled the large programs. The size of the C: drive is now 40GB which is more manageable for a Virtual Install which will be used to tweaking experimentation before I do it to my real Windows 8 installation.
How do I shrink the Virtual Hard drive from 130GB to say 45GB, I have installed the VM Tools and reading on the VMware website it saying you go to the VM Tools in the ghost install by right clicking it in the system tray or going to control panel on the ghost install and click on shrink. I have the icon in the system tray but the only right click options are about and there is nothing in control panel.
I have tried the "compact" option in the virtual machine settings by right click my Windows 8 virtual machine from the VMware player but it doesn't shrink the volume, it wirred away for an hour but the hard drive stayed the same size.
IF has Win 8 Pro 64bit in Wmware Player could they look to see if the shrink option is there on the Virtual install of Win 8 by right clicking VM tools in the system tray and clicking settings or options.
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Apr 2, 2013
I have bought a 2TB western Digital external USB3 hard drive and installed the Asmedia drivers but windows never picks it up. See the screen capture. The drivers are the ASMedia USB 3 host controller but it seems to show up after a few seconds as USB Root Hub (xHCI) with a triangle. I have tried updating from there and directing it to the drivers and uninstalling and then reinstalling and the drive shows up long enough to copy but then disappears again.
I literally have run out of options.
It seems to be a common theme on the web and especially with Western Diital drives although I think it is windows struggling to recognise them and implement correctly.
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Jan 22, 2013
I have installed Windows 8 on a fresh SSD drive and also connected my exsisting extra harddrive which I have previously used together with Windows 7. When I try to access that harddrive I get a "access denied" message even though I'm a administrator, what do I need to do to get access to my hard drive?
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Feb 23, 2014
I have a 1TB hard drive with a lot of free space, and I would like to use some of this space to set up a home server that I will eventually publish a web site to. I'm very new to setting up home servers but I read something about setting up a storage pool in order to set up a server.
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Oct 17, 2013
I have windows 8 installed on c drive and Linux mint installed on separate hard disk. Everything was working fine before I installed kubuntu from Linux mint. After installation I couldn't get into windows 8 because it was giving error message 0*c000000f. I tried to refresh Windows but no avail because windows has locked that drive and I couldn't access it. Than I decided to backup important files from windows 8 hard disk from Linux. I accessed windows 8 drive but three folders were missing "Windows" , "Users" and "Program Files(64)" other than that I can access all files and problem is all important data is in user folder.
Than I installed windows 8 on different partition still same thing cant access those three folders. Is there any possible way to simply access user folder?
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Sep 15, 2013
HP Envy dv7, Windows 8
Seagate 2TB drive mounted in a Thermaltake, Max 5 enclosure. The drive does not show in Windows 8. Does show when running Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) but shows as "Unallocated" without a drive letter. If run the Seagate drive tools, it shows up as unallocated, with drive letter "C". But there is obviously already a drive "C".
Disk Management does not present a means by which to assign a drive letter
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Apr 16, 2014
I am currently using windows7 in a 1 tb harddrive. I have another internal harddrive that im not using that has windows 8 on it but is only 150gb. How do i bring windows 8 to the 1tb harddrive i am using to replace windows 7?
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