Google+ Pieces o' Eight: November 2012

Monday 19 November 2012

Activating Windows 8 Upgrade After a Clean Install

If you bought an upgrade edition of Windows 8 Pro you might, like most sensible people, prefer to do a clean install rather than doing the upgrade. Sounds straight forwards, right? Wrong!

Although the installation appears to work ok, when you try to activate your copy of Windows 8 it will flat-out refuse to acknowledge your legitimate Windows product key. I have no idea why Microsoft have put this block in, other than to cause headaches for legitimate customers.

Happily, there is a work around - posted by someone going by the handle BinaryInk on the Windows forum  and re-posted here for posterity:

1. Run the registry editor (regedit) 
2. Find the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE 
3. Change the value for 'MediaBootInstall' from 1 to 0 
4. Open an elevated command prompt (run as admin) 
5. Run the following command: slmgr -rearm 
6. Reboot

If you already entered your key, check the activation: for me it was already activated and I needed to do nothing more. If not, type in activate windows and type in the key; it should work. Also, do yourself a favor and export this key from regedit and save it somewhere if you ever are required to do another clean install. I know I did.