I've bought Windows 8 when it was first released, but reinstalled Windows 7 again. Now I want to install Windows 8.1, but I get an error saying my product key is invalid. I've tried multiple product keys (We own multiple computers, two of which have Windows 8 installed), but I get the same error with all of them.
Edit: Because none of my product keys don't work, I can't install Windows 8 to further install Windows 8.1.
I bought 8 Toshiba Laptops for my company on 3rd Feb 2013 from Dubai . The laptops details as follows
Model: Thoshiba Laptop SC850 B560 i3
OS: Windows 8 single language
No DVD's and product key given at the time of purchase so how to get windows 8 single language software to re-install and the key for the same. As the OS were pre installed. This is to avoid future issues that may come up like software failure etc.
[ I need to download Windows 8 single language OS, product key for the same OS which is preinstalled- I can provide serial number if needed]
I already have a Windows 8 Pro USB installer setup but I don't think it can be used to do a repair install for my Windows 8.1 Pro upgrade. So I'm trying to create a new USB installer setup specifically for Win 8.1 Pro. However, the Windows 8.1 setup window is not accepting the 8.1 Product Key that I extracted from Belarc, ProduKey and WPkey. Is there a way to get around that issue so that I can create the Win 8.1 USB installer?
View 3 Replies View RelatedMy company gave me a Windows 8 Enterprise product key, which I'm trying to use to upgrade a version of Windows I'm running. I visited this link -- Upgrade Windows with only a product key - Microsoft Windows Support, clicked the "Install Windows 8" button, ran the setup file that downloaded, and when prompted for the product key, entered it, only to see the message.
The product key cannot be used to install a retail version of Windows 8.
Is there another ISO I should be using? Ultimately I'm trying to get an ISO for use with my VMWare Fusion 6 install running on my Mac (10.9.1). I'm confident the product key given to me by my company is legit, but it obviously isn't a retail product key, probably some kind of corporate key or the equivalent.
At the beginning, when I have started to setup windows 8 ,everything goes okay until the product key, I get an error message saying 'We couldn't verify the product key. Check the installation media'
And I had tried to install windows 8 on another PC with having same product key then I have noticed the product key has worked on that Pc! and not working on my PC.
So I have tried several times to enter lots of keys. why my PC is not verify any product keys?
So, I have purchased some computers from Dell and they have Windows 8.0 Professional from the OEM. So, it was very easy for me to use my MSDN media, reinstall Windows 8.0, and it simply detected and used my Windows 8 embedded BIOS key. From there, I would make any adjustments needed, run sysprep, and grab an image. This allowed me to use that image on any of the Dell's that I purchased with Windows 8 and all was great.
Then, along comes the free upgrade to Windows 8.1. I took one of my Dell's, and laid down a clean windows 8.0 image. Then I ran the Store "free" upgrade to Windows 8.1. All was well. I then cleaned up the temporary files and whatnot and tried to run Sysprep only to be greeted with an error that said, "I cannot validate your OS installation". Did some research and found that you aren't supposed to run Sysprep on a machine that you ran an "upgrade". Instead, you are supposed to install from scratch.
Ok, let's do that. Grabbed the 8.1 ISO from MSDN, put it onto an installable USB key, started the install and it now prompts me for a key. It won't detect or use the embedded 8.0 key that is on the box. So, I cannot actually clean install Windows 8.1 with the embedded OEM key, even though I can freely upgrade to 8.1.
I'm not going to take my new Dell computers, lay down the clean 8.0 image and then upgrade each of them manually via the store to Windows 8.1. This takes way too long.
I'm not going to use my MSDN keys to install onto these machines, because I don't want them to activate these keys. They aren't the legit keys for these machines. These machines have legit OEM Windows 8 keys and 8.1 is a free upgrade to 8.0, so it seems like these legit keys would work. I paid dell to have a valid OEM license on the computer, that is what I want to use.
Any way to get 8.1 Pro to install clean, on a machine with an embedded 8.0 Pro key.
Ive used pirated bootables with preinstalled product keys in the past but am now on the straight and narrow, wanting to add my product key to my legitimate copy of windows 8. This way I wont have to worry about having it written down, losing it or entering it incorrectly, since it will be automatically entered for me. How I can add the product key to my bootable image?
View 3 Replies View Relatedi have a problem switching from windows 7 home premium to window 8.1.
what to do?
I' am currently using a custom made laptop which I had to repair due to an hardware failure. After I got the PC back I reinstalled Windows but the product key I had wasn't working properly any more. Knowing that after an hardware change this is not an uncommon problem, I just used the option "Activate by phone" and everything went fine.
Unfortunately the last day I got the blue screen with the error 0xc0000021a, which I know is caused by misconfigured system files in the computer. Moreover this error is really similar to the error I got prior the hardware failure (0xc00000e). So I figured that maybe the Windows 8 installation I have (I purchased before Windows 8.1) has some problems, and maybe I can solve them by reinstalling directly Windows 8.1, instead of reinstalling Windows 8 and then upgrading it from the store.
The problem is that when I launch the Windows 8.1 set-up program to create a media for recovery, when asked for the product key mine doesn't work. I think this has something to do with the hardware change and with the fact that I used the "activate by phone" option, but my Windows version is legit and I paid for it, and therefore I want to be able to reset my computer if I need to (like now).
I tried to reinstall windows on a second hard drive, but it won't accept my product key, assumedly because I am already using it for the current windows installation on the first hard drive.
How do I transfer my license to allow a reinstallation on the second hard drive? That's the best option, so I can go back to the first drive if I want to.
Second option: If I wipe the current windows partition clean, will that enable me to reinstall on the second hard drive?
I'm using DISM to create a custom image, we use a vlk licence key to install but this isn't being accepted on the answer file. Its definatly a valid key and being entered correctly). I'm just getting the error 'The unattended answer file contains an invalid product key' Is there anything i can do to get around this?
View 4 Replies View RelatedHave a couple of different problems with my 8.1
When I try to use the tutorial,I get as far as the Product Key entry.
The install was an original 8 I downloaded when it first came out.
I then installed 8.1, probably from the Store.
I recently downloaded and install 8.1 Media Center Pack.
Had a real problem with activation.MS Support finally had me go to where there was a long activation string and then he gave me a new Product Key, which is now on the machine and Activated.
When I get to the "Product Key" page and enter the Media Pack key, "This product key didn't work. ....."
I recently purchased a MSI GT70 laptop that came preinstalled with Windows 8. Rather than try and uninstall all the bloatware, I was planning on just doing a clean install. Little did I know that Microsoft had changed the game when it comes to authentication on Windows 8 with the bios linked product keys.
The Windows 8 usb drive that I used previously to install Windows 8 on other computers does not work, I believe that is due to it recognizing it as a RETAIL version trying to be installed on an OEM system. Searching around, it seemed other people had success with using an .ISO from TechNet or MSDN and the installation automatically pulling the product key information. The .iso I used was sourced from the Microsoft store download.
After booting to the disk, I received this error: The product key entered does not match any of the Windows images available for installation. Enter a different product key.
I tried manually adding the PID.txt file with the product key I pulled from pkeyui (cross checked with showkey.vbs and RWEverything) but that resulted in the same error. For this notebook, the product key and MSDM are identical, whereas I read other people were finding two different product keys. One nestled deep in the bios and the other being what you see when you run Belarc Advisor etc.
Burning the .iso to a DVD and then starting the setup inside a session of Windows 8 resulted in a different error: this product key cannot be used to install a retail version
So once again back to the issue of using a retail .iso with an OEM product key to try and do a clean install. As far as I know you can't download an "oem .iso" but I'm not sure how to get the retail .iso to play nicely with the product key I have.
So exactly how does one do a clean install of an OEM windows 8 build on a laptop that comes preinstalled with windows 8? If I can't sort this out, I may be stuck with rooting out the bloatware.
I have Windows 8 consumer preview installed on my laptop. A couple days ago its licence expired, so I got Windows 8 professional to upgrade.
I made an install USB with the win7 USB utility and proceeded to boot from the stick. The setup then told me I should restart my pc and restart the installation from windows.
I did that, but Windows 8 setup won't start. It just starts reading from the usb for a second, then stops. The setup from the .iso I downloaded does the same thing.
To make things more interesting, the first time I restarted my PC after trying to upgrade windows from USB at start-up, I ran Windows 8 setup and it did start and started doing some things, on that small blue screen that pops up. I didn't pay attention to it until the blue setup screen disappeared and nothing else happened...
One more thing, I tried to install Microsoft windows server 2012 on my laptop a month ago and the same thing happened with the setup.
Did a few hours of research on the internet, tried to run it in compatibility mode.Can't really afford to do a "clean" install now, and on top of that, my PC reboots every 2 hours because my licence is expired...
I have just recently bought a new computer. If I knew I was going to have this issue I probably wouldn't have bought a 4TB HDD but anyway.
What I have done is read the article (this is where I found out I couldn't install to the 4TB HDD in the first place) on how to install Windows in UEFI format. I have created a USB flash to do this but still my HDD partion is only showing up at 1.6TB. It is setup as a GPT file format as it gave me all the prompts and created the Recovery, system partitions etc. How do I get this to work so when I do the install it shows up in the first place as the 4TB partition or at the end of it all is still not possible?
What I will be doing is installing Windows on this 4TB patition and then using a 256GB SSD in SSD Caching.
Am I better off getting a 1-2TB drive and installing normally instead of wasting my time or can this be done?
I thought I would look at creating/using my own media.
I have been using VMs for testing these, so much better than playing with someone's PC
I have ISOs for both 8.0 and 8.1 which I downloaded using Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 ISO - Download or Create. The licence key I used for the download was my legitimate one that I purchased from Microsoft (so it wasn't OEM), it is actually an upgrade key from Windows 7 for Win 8 Pro. I can install these ISOs no problem but they always install the Pro version and I never get an option for installing Home.
I tried putting a ei.cfg file in the sources directory containing
[EditionID]
[Channel]
Retail
[VL]
0
But this just allows me to install without the key. I tried putting both "Core" and "Home" in as an EditionID but the install process fails saying "The product key entered does no match any of the Windows images available for installation. Enter a different product key"
If I try using the downloaded iso without the ei.cfg file but instead use the generic key for Home I get the same message.
So I'm pretty sure the downloads I got from MS just contain Pro. Is this right or is there a special way of making Home available? Based upon what I have seen in the forums I would also probably need "Home Single Language" to be available as well (if possible).
In case it makes any difference the ISOs I have always set their language to English (United Kingdom) during the install.
I just can't seem to get windows 8 to install/use the ahci controller - some specifics:
- new system
- clean windows 8 install (non-pro)
- one new ssd drive and one new hybrid drive, latest firmware flashed
- windows 8 installed on ssd (samsung 120gb)
- bios set to ahci+raid
- bios version current
- installed Windows 8 without pre-installing latest storage drivers during setup, ahci not recognized in device manager
- reinstalled Windows 8 using latest pre-installed drivers during setup, ahci still not recognized in device manager
Spent a lot of time researching this issue and none of the suggestions i've come across seem to work, including registry hacks. regardless of what i do Windows 8 just won't recognize my drives as ahci mode - ahci mode is setup in bios but Windows 8 still loads the ide drivers which can be seen in device manager under ata/atapi controllers. Why won't windows 8 recognize the bios ahci setting?
chipset - intel pch-c206
hp z1 server
latest bio update installed
cpu - e-1245
ssd (120gb) - operating system
hybrid drive (500gb) - storage
memory - 16gb
Laptop came with Windows 8 and has been updated to 8.1
Installed Ubuntu on a new partition, but no matter how many times I try, I can't get the machine to load Grub at power-on. If I boot Super Grub Disk/Rescatux, I see the installed Ubuntu, but other tools (like EasyBCD) only see Windows.
Apparently, we're no longer using MBR? Everything I used to know about computers seems to have become false in the last year or 2. How do I get Grub working on this new EFI thing?
I have used Pragon HDM 14 to migrate existing Win 8.1 installation (gpt with uefi and secure boot) to new hdd. Migration went ok, system booted up from new hdd. However after that it seems hibernation does not work. When I hibernate and power on back pc, it does a clean start. System event log says the system has shut down inapriopertly. I have tried to turn off and on hibernation, disable safe boot, nothing worked.
View 5 Replies View RelatedI purchased a Lenovo Y510P laptop over a month ago which came with Windows 8.0. and I hated it from the get go. I was aware that 8.1 was available as a free download so I downloaded and installed it. All of these updates seem to have bogged down my system. When I click on what I am assuming is the new start button (the white house icon in the taskbar) it takes 6-10 seconds for the menu to appear .
I dug out the key with Belarc advisor and went to MS's site to download an ISO of 8.1 but it told me that it would not let me download the 8.1 ISO since my key was for 8.0. If I were able to get my hands on a 8.1 disc would I be able to use my 8.0 key to do a clean install of 8.1? It is so disappointing to have purchased such a powerful laptop and have it bogged down by so many updates as well as all of the bloatware that came preinstalled on it.
I have a Laptop with a 120GB Solid State Drive. My primary operating system has been Windows 7 Ultimate. Recently I decided to try and Install Windows 8 Pro Along side windows 7 . Dual Boot. I read about Dual Booting in this Official Windows 8 Magazine and it seemed easy. I ran into a few problems:
1. I was able to 'shrink Volume' to create another partition of atleast the 20GB minimum required for windows 8. I did 25GB's because my 120gb solid state drive was almost full with other windows 7 files and partitions. The problem I ran into was in creating a 'New Simple Volume' and formatting my new 25GB's of space. An Error message saying "not enough memory or space available to perform operation" kept popping up.
Am I getting these error messages because I already have 4 different partitions on my drive? The different partitions were A: Windows 7 OS and Files, B: Windows 7 Hibernation, C: Windows 7 Recovery and D: an unknown 8gb primary partition
2. I decided to delete the Windows 7 Recovery partition, because I have my Windows 7 DVD, and I didn't mind re-installing everything if I were to mess up. Plus my OS doesn't run from that partition, and I'll have room to create my new Windows 8 simple volume. (probably a dumb decision)
3. Disk management didn't want to delete my Recovery partition (probably for good reason) and merge it's free space with my 25GB' partition that I had previously created and was unable to create the New simple volume in. I had to use a 3rd party program called Paragon Partition Manager free edition to do this. I had to restart my laptop for Paragon to delete the 2GB recovery partiton and merge the space with my un-formatted 25GB partition. After the Paragon program finished, my laptop wouldn't boot windows 7 and just hung up with an Intel boot agent screen.
4. Luckily, I had already made my Windows 8 bootable flash drive to Install the OS. Since Windows 7 wasn't booting, I decided to go ahead and try to install windows 8 with my flash drive. It worked! I found my 27GB partition in the setup menu, was able to format it, and install Windows 8. Now windows 8 starts up! My other partition with windows 7 also shows up in Disk management and In my computer!.
5. My biggest question is, How can I make that Windows 8 Dual boot screen pop up when I turn on my laptop? I can boot into windows 7 if I go to Disk Management in Windows 8, Right click my windows 7 partition, and click "Make Active partition". I then hit restart, and my laptop boots to Windows 7 no problem. I Can boot into windows 8 by doing the same Thing in Disk Management in Windows 7. "Make Active Partition" and restart Pc. So in a sense, I have what I want; Windows 7 and Windows 8. But, I shouldn't have to go into Disk Management each time I want to change the system Im using. how to get the Windows 8 Dual Boot option at startup?
I've got an Asus n550lf with windows 8 single language. Because I'm noob and I wanted to have dual-boot without gpt disks, I've raped off my original windows 8 oem. I've reinstalled but I guess it is Windows 8 Core.
I tried to use slmpt -ipk cdkeyhere but it gives me a message error.
How can i force my oem key to work and activate my windows 8 core?
I went to update my father's old PC to 8.1 and I get the message that his CPU is not supported. That you need the combination of SSE2+NX+PAE.
He has a Intel Pentium 4 Prescott 630 3GHz. I looked it up and it should qualify for the upgrade. I ran CPUID and it says it has the SSE instructions (says MMX, SSE (1, 2, 3), EM64T).
I'm pretty sure it supports PAE (how do I check that???).
And in the BIOS, the Execute Disable Bit is turned ON (this is Intel's equivalent to NX?).
Is there any way to bypass this check and install the OS?
i want to copy my C: to new HDD. i also want to put the bootfiles in separate Boot-partition in new HDD. the boot-files are currently together with windows partition in C: in old HDD.
How can i copy my current windows to work on new HDD and also the bootfiles in separate partition?
I have to galaxy s2 one of of the can't connect to the pc and the other one can. The one which dosn't connect a messege pops up ( the last device you connected to this computer malfunctioned and windows dosen't recognize it.
View 2 Replies View RelatedOne of our software providers has instructed us to make some changes to our Win 8 PC's registry to get the software to work properly. They have sent me details of what changes are required:
Open Windows Registry Editor (Regedit)
Right click HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT - click PERMISSIONS - click ADVANCED
Click/Check: REPLACE ALL CHILD OBJECT PERMISSION ENTRIES WITH INHERITABLE PERMISSION ENTRIES FROM THIS OBJECT
Double click the entries: USERS, CREATOR and ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES
For each entry:
TYPE: Select Allow Applies to: Select This key and subkeys
Click/Check: Full control and Read
Click OK on Entry detail screen
Click OK on Entries list screen
I know very little about Windows Registry other than not to touch it. These changes seem quite extreme.
I got this msg tryng to refresh my pc . because my vaio gate app wasnt working right . so after the restar i just got the blue screen with this error the boot configutating data file dosent have valid infomation of an operating system.
Error code 0xc000098 /BCD
My search feature isn't working. This is the main search that should start with you typing while the metro screen is up. Some time ago it just disappeared. I've tried a couple of things to get it to work, but I can't.
View 5 Replies View RelatedIve got a bit of annoying problem with one of my Windows 8 computers. For some reason when I right click in the bottom left corner the administration tools don't appear like they do on other computers. Oddly though they do work fine on the same computer using another user account.
I use a roaming profile and I've tried deleting it and allowing it to be reloaded but that hasn't worked.
Edit: just want to add that the administration tools menu works fine on all other windows 8 computers using the same roaming profile.
I am using a Wacom Cintiq Companion and just upgraded to Windows 8.1. After the upgrade my right-click stopped working and when I try to right-click it freezes my left click so I have to restart.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI have windows 8.1 installed in both my laptop and desktop. Both of them have the same problem.
Hyperlinks in metro tiles doesn't work. For example hotmail hyperlinks doesn't work or skype try to open but fail. I think the problem occurred after a deep registry clean i made but i am not sure. I tried to uninstall/reinstall the programs but no results.