my buddy brought over a brand new gateway desktop with win 8. we couldn't make new users etc because it wanted a password which he either forgot or did not know. So I took another hard drive and temporarily installed win 8 (core_64) on it. I took a guess he had core and he has 6gb ram so I did the 64 bit. eventually I will trueimage this temp drive back to his original. I don't understand why it wont boot to the drive with this new fangled uefi ?? bios. I used the CYQG3 s/n just to do the install. I was under the impression that the bios would now automatically activate my core version. Isn't it built into the bios in win 8?? could he have the pro version installed (which I also have) or a 32 bit version?? if I change the bios to legacy it will boot but don't you have to keep the authentication tab enabled etc. what am I doing wrong? Sorry for being a nubie with Win 8 activation. Can anyone set me in the right direction. Regards...
Booting with a GPT is slightly different than booting with a MBR which is what most hard drives default to. Firstly you need to know the product key and version of your windows 8 that it is using. This is extremely difficult if you don't even know how to set up a local account. If you don't know, you don't have to set up the account using a microsoft email address. You can choose a local account After choosing the other settings such as automatic updates and stuff, it will tell you to enter your email and pw or at the very bottom, select a local account. When you make a local account you can make a password, but you don't have to. Once you are inside windows 8, load advanced tokens manager from joshcellsoftwares. His project page is in the mdl projects. Save your existing activation info. Inside the activation info folder it creates, the config will have your key and the backup data.dat and tokens.dat Save the entire folder and backup folder somewhere safe like a spare flash drive or cdrom or something. Once you know the key you can install the same version from any matching windows 8 dvd. Heck you might even be able to download a free replacement iso from microsoft if I understand their new policy correctly. The replacement dvd likely just has the single version on it. Technically a little inferior to the RTM in terms of being able to integrate and such, but if you are just going to do installs with it; should work nicely. Anyhow, you wouldn't need the key except if you did a fresh install and it didn't pull up the key automatically from the bios, such that a release such as an AIO has an ei.cfg. They stopped including it by default, but a lot of integrators keep putting it back in since it lets you install without entering the key. This wouldn't help you activate though. You need to know your buddy's pkey.
I forgot about the GPT part. To set up a GPT you just enter diskpart. You can do this in win8 setup by pressing shift-f10 IIRC, or shift-f9 or something... Once in command prompt just type "diskpart" In diskpart: list disk select disk 1 (If 1 is the disk of the size you want to format with the GPT boot sector) clean convert GPT exit exit Then simply install win8 onto the unpartitioned space. Note that if you physically have the other drive still connected, win8 will set the boot data in the first physical drive, not the second. You need to physically disconnect a previous drive if you don't want booting errors after setup
With all due respect, I don't see the point of avoiding it. My Dell XPS 8700 came with Windows 8 on a 1TB GPT drive. I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 to transfer it to a 128GB SSD. Boots fast as Hell. My main data drive is 2TB NFTS. Also a 3TB GPT drive for backup images. I would agree, however, don't jump to GPT before you understand it. IE: - make sure all of your backup, recovery and partitioning utilities are GPT compatible. You do want to avoid 3TB of data going "poof" because of a "misunderstanding".
ok so for the future if I encounter other Win 8 store bgt machines that use the uefi bios (gpt) how would I install win 8 onto it and get it activated if the owner does not have and win info such as edition or s.n. I do have a dvd with the pro and core versions (32/64). are you saying to just change the bios to legacy and install with MBR. if so than how do you activate in that scenario. If i'm not making sense its because I still do not have a grasp on win 8 activation of a corrupted win 8 install. regards...
I had a clients Dell Inspiron the other day and it it had GPT and I wiped that bitch clean (Had 6 OEM partitions!!), changed it to MBR and installed Windows 8 core and it activated automatically just fine so GPT is not needed at all for Windows 8 activation.
I know for sure you can put the viewer on a USB and boot to a Windows DVD/USB installer and it will run. But you could, if you have hirens boot cd, boot to mini xp and start both of them there.