Part of my job is to prepare new laptops for end users that comes from OEMs. Since the included windows installation on most laptops is loaded with "bloatwares" we used to deploy a fresh Win7 Image in WDS and activate using OEM slic which made them completely legal. That was in the Windows 7 days. Now I'm trying to do about the same thing with Windows 8 however since there is no SLIC it gets a little bit trickier. Here is what we are doing right now: -pull the hard drive from the laptop -make a backup of 'Store' folder -Reinstall hard drive, deploy Image or Clone from same model. -pull the hard drive again -overwrite content of Store folder with the old one -Change folder permissions -put the hard disk back in the laptop, let it boot. -Windows complain about an activation error, reboot or CMD>slmgr -dli. -activated again. Do you guys have any idea to speed up the process? The hardest part in fact is to take note of which Store folder goes with which laptop.
wow, what a pain in the neck! my sympathies.. if the lappies are identical, i would be tempted to clean a single bloatware lappy manually,takes some time, okay.. boot all the others from usb or cd, make a ramdrive at boot and copy store folder to it..then delete the entire cdrive, copy the cleaned cdrive from the cleaned lappy to the cdrive, and the store folder from the ramdrive..so each lappy gets its own store folder back. saves unplugging umpteen harddisks... you could probably do it from a script, in the good old dos days, config.sys and autoexec.bat could have done the trick..
You make a good point, Yes I'm pulling the store folder before actually booting the laptop because I do not want to go through all the EULA stuff to save some time, however this is probably the reason why it's complaining when I first boot it after copying back the store folder (let alone some folder permissions issues) It does gets activated after a while though, probably because it contacts MS Server in the background, I haven't checked network traffic. If I only pull the product key from the ACPI table and re-enter it after imaging would it activate successfully? (I assume yes?) This key can be pulled even if I did not make a backup of it since it's stored in the BIOS anyway?
Yes it's stored inside the UEFI (W8 devices don't come with BIOS ) so you can just read the Product Key from the ACPI MSDM Table and enter it over slmgr -ipk or the Windows Interface and done. So yeah if you never boot it you can straight skip all the "store" backup stuff, as it's not activated anyway ^^
I often have to work on notebooks and am unfamiliar with this "store" folder for Win8. Most of my work has been upgrading from Win7 Home Prem to Pro. What exactly is in the Store folder?? Where is it located? Permissions??