Laptop Asking me Activate after resintalling window 8

Liamb2005 · 21 Jul 2013 at 20:10

Hi Guy, I have a Asus S500CA laptop with windows 8 installaed and i made the mistake of installing the windows 8.1 beta which caused me alsorts of problems. I could not locate ny windows 8 key either on the laptop or in the packing then read online the key was kept in the bios so i reinstalled the whole thing from scratch an afte the installtion its now asking me to activate with a serial key (which i obviously dont have)

Does anyone know how i can resolve this ?

Jimbo Mahoney · 22 Jul 2013 at 22:09

My guess is that you'll need to use an Asus / OEM Windows 8 install.

If you used a retail, it will expect a retail key.

Skynet5 · 22 Jul 2013 at 23:29

Not on a sticky label on the back, or in battery compartment? Is on my Alienware.

Plus also in bios so you really need a disaster for it to not auto activate.

thepharcyde · 23 Jul 2013 at 12:22

DUP post

thepharcyde · 23 Jul 2013 at 12:24

serials are encoded in BIOS. You will need the OEM that came preinstalled or a retail licence for your source ISO.

Next time backup a image

Liamb2005 · 25 Jul 2013 at 15:12

yeah I know all this now guys thanks, lol
any idea how I can sort it though ? asus are a nightmare honestly im going in circles with them, any suggestions at all would be massively appreciated thanks

Liamb2005 · 25 Jul 2013 at 15:13

how can I get the oem version that was installed ?

pepp77 · 25 Jul 2013 at 15:20

Liamb2005 said:
how can I get the oem version that was installed ?

When you first turned the laptop on it should have asked you to create a restore disc, or there would have been an option within the windows installation to create a restore disc.

You need this disc to restore the OEM install of Windows usually.

Liamb2005 · 25 Jul 2013 at 15:29

thanks for the reply but it never asked to create a restore disc, is there no other way ?

Stormster · 25 Jul 2013 at 23:36

Dont they have restore partitions like the W7 units?

Voodle · 26 Jul 2013 at 00:44

That's odd, I did a clean install of Win8 pro on my XPS 13 (cos the dell restore image was imo bad) and that activated straight away. I don't know if mine was an oem or retail DVD though

jkb · 26 Jul 2013 at 11:35

Voodle said:
That's odd, I did a clean install of Win8 pro on my XPS 13 (cos the dell restore image was imo bad) and that activated straight away. I don't know if mine was an oem or retail DVD though

Same here when I installed windows for a friend on a new hard drive after the original one failed. I used my win 8 iso, the BIOS had the key stored and it activated immediately.