As some of you might remember, I wrote some articles back in January on how to upgrade an illegal Windows 8 Professional PC to a GENUINE Windows 8 Pro Media Center installation. Microsoft had a giveaway, giving the upgrade keys away for free!
Those keys needed to be installed before a certain date - afterwards activation would not be possible anymore.
A friend of mine ran in problems: Windows 8 wouldn't boot anymore (Dell). Long story short: ntfs file system corruption damaged the system. I fixed everything, but language pack wouldn't install any more*.
So this is what I did. I took one of my machines (different Dell) which still was virgin clean and contained another illegally obtained legal Windows 8 Professional MC key.
I backuped my friend's Dell AND I backuped her license. First, I tried it manually but in the end Advanced Tokens Manager (
http://joshcellsoftwares.com/products/advancedtokensmanager/) is the best solution for this. And easiest. ALSO you need to WRITE DOWN the Media Center key. I used Belarc.com Advisor for this...
I then transferred MY Dell's Windows 8 to her hard drive. Windows started without problems, all being Dell OEM hardware (and Win 8 which became more flexible...) I booted the system and tried many things to get it activated. All failed, partially...
This will work:
FIRST you need to restore the MC key back to Windows! ATM will NOT do this correctly for the illegal Win 8 MC editions out there... Run an elevated command prompt cmd.exe, type: slmgr -ipk 6RH4V-HNTWC-JQKG8-RFR3R-36498
Of course, you replace above key with YOUR key ;p TO MY SURPRISE it actually worked! And Windows 8 replaced MY key with my friend's key!
THEN you can use Advanced Tokens Manager to restore the backup of the old system to the fresh system.
All activated. All well, even updating Language Packs...
I found a lot of helpful information, here:
https://www.google.com/?&q=site:forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/27341-Advanced-Tokens-Manager-The-Activation-Backup-Solution+%22media+center%22&sa=N&safe=off&start=10, especially the tip to FIRST fix key problems before restoring activation...
Another interesting read is:
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/7e39ca/backup-and-restore-windows-8-activation/ (MIRROR without pictures:
http://malwaretips.com/Thread-How-to-backup-and-restore-Windows-8-activation). And also:
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/35737-GUIDE-How-to-backup-and-restore-Windows-8-activationHelp me help you!
https://copy.com/?r=zOEhNk - Clear 15GB of cloud storage and...
... karma for you
Devvie
~~~ notemail@facebook.com ~~~
Conare nullius momenti videri fortasse missilibus careant
——
All spelling mistakes are my own and may only be distributed under the GNU General Public License! – (© 95-1 by Coredump; 2-013 by DevNullius)
*
http://scforum.info/index.php/topic,8330.msg21190.html#msg21190 - Windows 8 Multilingual User Interface Packs