I have a Windows 8.1 laptop, I want to reinstall Windows 8.1 to get rid of the bloatware, is there any way to backup the activation? I know with Windows 7 I would just run activation backup and restore, it would give me the key and certification file, I'd put the certificate in the $OEM$ etc folders and had the key in a autounattend file on the root so it would be activated on first boot. I have tried Advanced Tokens Manager and backed up my activation, I then used a different hard drive (didn't want to wipe the working hard drive yet!) and reinstalled Windows 8.1, I put the key (used ProduKey) inside a autounattend file that WinToolKit created, when it loaded it wasn't activated, so I tried to restore from Advanced Tokens Manager but it didn't work? I could try a online activation I guess it should work, but I might want to reinstall it a few more times and I understand you only get 1 activation in a certain time period? Thanks Mike
if the key is embedded in the BIOS, you don't need to backup an activation. just install the same version of the OS on the second hard drive and it should activate automatically. if it doesn't, you'll need to open command prompt as admin and use the following commands to load the product key into Windows and tell the system to activate slmgr -ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX slmgr -ato for future reference, backing up the activation only works when reinstalling on the same hard drive.