Saturday, October 27, 2012

How-to: Windows 8 Professional Upgrade install and activation on system without OS installed



Using this info you should be able to do a clean install of the Windows 8 Upgrade on a system without an Operating system.

  • 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.
This is the same method that worked for Windows 7.