# Windows 8 Clean Install



## MPR (Aug 28, 2010)

I just got my new Crucial 256 GB M4 SSD in the mail. Since my Windows 8 install is relatively new I thought I'd just go ahead and do a clean install to the new drive. In order to avoid confusion with my old install I pulled my two hard drives, leaving the M4 as the only drive in the system.

I was curious to see if Windows 8 would clean install from the upgrade media without having to reinstall Windows 7 then install the upgrade over it. Note that I had previously upgraded to Windows 8 Pro 64-bit over a retail version of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and both installs had been previously activated.

I used the clean install procedures here:

How To Clean Install Windows 8 (Part 1 of 2)

Windows started up and ran just fine but was not activated, nor would it accept my product key in the activation window. OK, I thought, lesson learned, I'll just get out the old Windows 7 DVD and install it then upgrade. I had the Win 7 disk in the drive when I thought that it might make sense to do a bit more looking around before spending an extra couple of hours on this install.

Searching the official and quasi-official forums I kept seeing "You cannot do a clean install of Windows 8 unless you are currently running a previous version of Windows." However, one post intrigued me -- seems the user had called Microsoft when he couldn't activate and a MS tech remote accessed his computer and changed a Registry key value, then then ran a DOS command, which allowed the activation to proceed.

With computers, knowing something can be done is half the battle won. It took me only a couple more minutes to find this workaround.

Change the value here from 1 to 0

HEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE\MediaBootInstall

Open an elevated command prompt and enter the command "slmgr /rearm"

Did this work? Well, I ran a couple of commands to check (note that I have installed Media Center too, which is currently free for Pro editions).

As far as I can tell, Windows is properly activated. Do any of the expert techs here see any indication that it isn't (I can always reinstall Win 7 and upgrade over it if there is a problem).


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## Winux (Nov 28, 2012)

Looks good to me! Thanks for the tips, by the way! I'll keep this in mind if I ever run across this - very, very useful information. I would say you could always double check here, but it failed on my 2012 server (even though I know it's a very genuine install).


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## Adamworthy (Dec 17, 2008)

Yep, this is the same way I did it.

I hate upgrading systems, I prefer a clean install of a new OS.


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