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Rexter
Libertas, Aequitas, Veritas
join:2002-11-17
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Rexter

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[WIN8] WINDOWS 8 UPGRADE ON NEW hd

I have a Vista laptop with a failing HD. I'm going to replace the hard drive, and upgrade it to Windows 8 Pro. I have an upgrade license that I bought when they were $40.
With the Windows 7 upgrade license you were able to legitimately install it on top of itself to get it to be seen as an upgrade, rather than installing the old OS first. Does Windows 8 work the same way, or will I have to install Vista first?
Gem
Premium Member
join:2005-09-10

Gem

Premium Member

Re: [WIN8] wINDOWS 8 UPGRADE ON NEW hd

You should be able to install W8 as a clean install on your new hard drive.

That's what I did on one of two W8 upgrades. It worked fine.

dib22
join:2002-01-27
Kansas City, MO

dib22 to Rexter

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to Rexter
said by Rexter:

With the Windows 7 upgrade license you were able to legitimately install it on top of itself to get it to be seen as an upgrade, rather than installing the old OS first. Does Windows 8 work the same way, or will I have to install Vista first?

On 8 you will be prompted for the key at install, then it will install. If it then states that is is not activated you can "refresh" the install and it will show activated (refresh is basically a re-install and it ends up working like the double install did on win7).

You can then get rid of the windows.old with "disk cleanup, ok, cleanup system files".

»www.eightforums.com/tuto ··· 8-a.html

Rexter
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join:2002-11-17
cloud 9

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Rexter

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I'm not really sure I see a point to the "refresh" for this purpose. I installed it the first time. It accepted the key for install, but refused to activate. I then went through the install process again, while deleting the entire hard drive, clean install. This time it activated automattically. Basically, it does work just like Windows 7 Upgrade, except you have to enter the key to get it installed both times.

dib22
join:2002-01-27
Kansas City, MO

dib22

Member

Windows 8 has a built in "re-install" function that they call refresh.

here is a clean install guide with most of the possibilities:

»www.eightforums.com/tuto ··· ade.html
dib22

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to Rexter
said by Rexter:

I'm not really sure I see a point to the "refresh" for this purpose. I installed it the first time. It accepted the key for install, but refused to activate. I then went through the install process again, while deleting the entire hard drive, clean install. This time it activated automattically. Basically, it does work just like Windows 7 Upgrade, except you have to enter the key to get it installed both times.

If you already did a 2nd install there is no need to refresh.

The refresh is what you do on an win 8 upgrade clean install instead of a double install.

Rexter
Libertas, Aequitas, Veritas
join:2002-11-17
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Rexter

Member

I understand. It's nice to know that feature is there. My point is doing a refresh takes only slightly less time, and a full reinstall is cleaner.

I'm having another problem though. Some time when Windows boots up, it brings me to a blue screen. Not a BSOD, just a blue screen with the mouse cursor on it, but no user log on options. You can move the mouse, but you can do nothing else, not even a CtR-Alt-Del does anything. I have the power button set to turn off, so I use that to try again. It boots properly about 1 out of 3 times. Any idea what that might be? It seems to have started when I installed the graphics driver, but that may just be a quinkidink. This is a Pavilion dv6000. HP doesn't officially support anything beyond Vista on this, and you have to get the nvidia Geforce Go 6150 drivers from hp.

Pirate515
Premium Member
join:2001-01-22
Brooklyn, NY

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Re: [WIN8] WINDOWS 8 UPGRADE ON NEW hd

Here's another tip on activating clean install of Win8 with upgrade key. Simple registry edit and reboot does the trick.

»www.ghacks.net/2012/10/2 ··· ossible/

Rexter
Libertas, Aequitas, Veritas
join:2002-11-17
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Rexter

Member

Very nice! Thank you!
Activate Windows 8 Pro Upgrade

Windows 8 users who noticed that the operating system can’t be activated after the installation may want to try the following workaround that worked to activate when installing Windows 8 using an upgrade on a clean PC.

Open regedit by pressing Windows-q, entering regedit and selecting the result from the list of hits.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
Change MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0
Go back to the start screen and enter cmd there.
Right-click Command Prompt and select to run it as administrator.
Type slmgr /rearm on the command line and hit enter.
Reboot Windows now.
Run the activation utility afterwards, enter your product key to activate Windows.