Problems in t' household

[Phage]

OK. Stepson #2 deciding that he couldn't wait, without at least taking the system image first, has upgraded his laptop (Asus X552CL) to W10.

The bad news is, that he has forced it by doing a clean install over his 8.1 OEM and now (quelle surprise) it won't activate.

Symptoms of the Patient

1. W10 says it is not Activated, otherwise works fine.
2. Whilst there is a Windows.old directory there is no rollback option in Windows 10.
3. The recovery partition appears to be borked, becuase when I boot from the ASUS recovery option (F9) I am unable to reset as the PC says the partition no longer exists, despite disk manager saying it's there and healthy (450Mb)

As far as I can see there are two options;

Somehow do a clean install of 8.1, upgrade, and then activate.

I did try this initially by using nirsoft to get the OEM 8.1 key, booting from my 8.1 DVD and trying to install. This failed, as the install software refused to recognise the OEM key I had extracted via nirsoft.
I suspect that I may have to try and convince someone in MS to activate his OEM key over the phone ? Not sure if that will work....

Convince MS to activate his W10 over the phone with a new key.

Not sure that this is doable at all. Might be my last shot before having to buy a license.

Am I missing anything ?

Thanks

[MrJim]

I suspect that I may have to try and convince someone in MS to activate his OEM key over the phone ? Not sure if that will work....

I recently reinstalled Windows 8.1, and used the automated telephone activation system. It's a pain because you have to type in a long string of numbers that you're given, & then retype another long string to activate, but it works...

[Phage]

I think that's what I'll try and do. I was thinking that the combined might of expertise around here would just be able top point out something really obvious that I'd missed, like,

Just press Alt-Backspace-Uparrow to kick off the Recovery Process from the hidden partition....

[Domestic_Ginger]

Contact Asus support and see if they can help? I'm sure you're not the only one.

Either tell the truth( in which case they may try to pass the buck) or tell them you can't reactivate your 8.1 install.

[Phage]

Yep. Not sure if Asus support are any good with out of warranty software issues though. I know most help desks are poor in that area.

[Lucio]

You're going to need an OEM Win 8.1 disc to use the extracted key, if you can get hold of one of them you can use your extracted key.

[Phage]

Aye. But I'm thinking it's going to nuke his HDD, and he's not got a backup. So i'll have to wait until he returns and get him to back up his data