in the past when you moved the already activated windows to a different system you had to re activate the windows at the minimum and most of the time it would not even boot. just got me a ASUS laptop with windows 8 pre installed and activated. after playing around with it i decided to replace it's hard drive with SSD. so i cloned the windows 8 partition and everything worked out perfect and still activated. few days later i mounted the original drive that came with the laptop in a new system i was building which had a GIGABYTE board and to my surprise it booted of the windows 8 partition as it was installed on it and it is still ACTIVATED!!! i really have no idea how is that possible but here it is a week later and it is still activated. what do you think happened here? is it just a fluke or this can be repeated on other systems as well?
Something similar was already mentioned. Seems MS activation in W8 is not that strict as we know it from previous releases.
Changing hard disks and cloning rarely causes the loss of activation, so nothing new. Totally misleading to say `new system'. Motherboard change causes a loss of activation and it can be reactivated but one should always reinstall on a new CPU and motherboard. I have changed hard disks and cloned at least 50 times and I never lost activation or required reactivation. Reactivation anyway is not a decrement from your allotted activation count.
But he's saying that he took only the original hard drive from an asus notebook and installed it in a gigabyte motherboard desktop system. So the only item carried over from the "old" system to the "new" system is the hard drive, and yet it retains the activation (according to him).
Yes I very much doubt it would still be activated, it would be like taking an drive from an OEM:SLP activated machine and putting it in machine without SLIC in bios it will not activate. I know widows 8 uses OA3.0 but it still has to match the MSDM key in bios.
I can confirm that what the OP stated can happen. I had an SSD drive installed in my ASUS p8p67 desktop system with Win8 pro activated and took that SSD drive and installed it into my ASUS g73jh laptop. The laptop booted up installed new drivers and has been activated for a while now. One thing to note is this was kms activated.
what i normally do is re-install x2...i also upgraded new system not long ago and had to do 2 installs in order for it to work..first one not activated then 15 mins or less later 2nd one worked...is the only way i know to my knowledge but id be happy also to hear of other ways. i also know the backup trick also if you already had a fully activated windows 8 but again that's only for that machine / set-up.