Looking for some info on Windows 8 Installs

[Gotenks98]

In my current job we do alot of reinstalls for students. Often times they have issues with their systems and the recovery options do not work. In the event that this happens I wanted to know more about how systems with Windows 8 have the product key stored in the bios now. I know prior to that their was some kind of cert that was in the bios that allowed certain oem key installs to work with royalty oem media like for xp/vista/7. So what I want to know is does this have to be special media or does this work with all media now?

[daniel1212]

it seems that reinstalls would be less of a problem, and that no special media would be neded except the OS disk or USB.Devices from major OEMs pre-loaded with Windows 8 now store their product key directly in firmware rather than printed on a Certificate of Authenticity sticker. While this new system is designed to prevent OEM product keys from being used on computers they are not licensed for, the system also allows the installer to automatically detect and accept the product key?simplifying the process of re-installing Windows.^[30]

This may help somewhat: http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Secure-Boot-Controversy-What-does-mean-IT.html

But others are asking and commenting about this issue: http://hardforum.com...d.php?t=1730343

And you and any reinstallers may find this pertinent: "How the new Windows 8 license terms affect you" http://www.zdnet.com/how-the-new-windows-8-license-terms-affect-you-7000003028/

[daniel1212]

And this user asserts,

Windows 8 changes your hard drive from MBR to GPT (boot sector) and each one does not like the other. Thus you CANNOT boot a Windows 7 recovery USB drive AND/OR do a Windows 7 image restore if your hard drive is set as a GPT volume/disk; likewise, you CANNOT do a Windows 7 MBR image recovery from a Windows 8 recovery bootable USB drive. http://www.amazon.com/review/R3O1HIGQKJF33P/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B008H3SW4I&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=

[Gotenks98]

And this user asserts,

Windows 8 changes your hard drive from MBR to GPT (boot sector) and each one does not like the other. Thus you CANNOT boot a Windows 7 recovery USB drive AND/OR do a Windows 7 image restore if your hard drive is set as a GPT volume/disk; likewise, you CANNOT do a Windows 7 MBR image recovery from a Windows 8 recovery bootable USB drive. http://www.amazon.co...de=&nodeID==

I am not sure what that person did to screw up their machine. I can tell you 100% that this does not happen unless you go and purposely change the drive options to this using something other than the default installer. I have yet to see a machine come in with that configuration or get this configuration during one of our clean install upgrade to windows 8.