I had a client with an Asus SonicMaster S200E laptop (really a largish netbook). The hard drive failed and he didn’t have an image or recovery disks. Asus was no help so I turned to the real supporter of Microsoft products — torrents.
What a nightmare figuring out how to get Win8 to install on his computer.
- The install files have to be on a Fat32 formatted thumb drive. Of course, the SonicMaster wouldn’t accept a usb dvd player as a boot device.
- After hours and hours of downloading and searching I found a friendly ISO torrent that worked for me. Go figure, it’s from Russia With Love.
Magnet Link - Then I used Yummi to make that iso file bootable on the Fat32 formatted 16GB flash drive (4GB wasn’t quite big enough, 8GB would have done but I didn’t have one).
- I formatted the flash to Fat32 before running YUMI-2.0.0.4 from PenDriveLinux.com. Here’s a screen shot of the Yummi ready to go:
- The laptop booted and installed just fine. I choose to not input a license number at this time.
- Now, I had to get the license number for Windows8. Of course, it’s in the bios. There’s a program to get it, so once I had installed Win8 I was able to run wpkey_v1.4.7d from softpedia (which means you’ll probably get that damn search.conduit, so be careful). This youtube video on wpkey will show you how to use it.
- Once I had the product key it was a simple matter to search for “activate” and enter a new key. Worked great.
- One more step for that particular iso setup, I had to change the computername/workgroup.