How to Clean Install Windows 8 from Pro Update Pack
Microsoft is offering Windows 8 Professional upgrade for $15 only if you have a PC with windows 7 that was bought after June 2nd. But the question has been asked widely over the internet that can you re-install windows 8 from this upgrade pack directly or you should install windows 7 first and then upgrade it to windows 7?
Well answer to this question is simply, yes! You can re-install windows 8 from the upgrade package without having to install windows 7 first. For this you can adopt several methods to make your windows 8 installation source.
You can either use a built-in Windows 8 utility to create your own recovery media from where you can recover your windows 8 at later stage. This recovery media can be optical or USB storage. To make windows 8 recovery disk, on the Start Screen, search for recovery. Under Settings, there is a desktop utility called “Create a recovery drive”.
Note that this recovery media is the Windows Pre-installation Environment (Windows PE). It’s an advanced boot feature that allows users to boot into the PE to recover Windows. It does need either a system image or a recovery partition to work.
If you create a system image using the Windows backup utility, you can use that in conjunction with the recovery drive to do a complete Windows installation.
Creating ISO with Update Pack:
You can also create windows 8 ISO with Microsoft Update Pack. The update pack will create an ISO and tell you how to burn it to a DVD or Flash Drive.
How to do a Fresh Install:
If you want to do a fresh install of windows 8 without recovering your old settings, you can go to settings in the recovery and there you will see an option to refresh either with user settings/files or without. Simply choose to refresh without these settings and it will be just like fresh install. Or you can simply install your windows 8 from the ISO created above just like you are familiar with the installation of windows 8.
Activating Windows 8 after Fresh Install:
Note that you can clean install windows 8 with your product key but it will not allow you activate, rather an error will be shown like this:
To solve this error, follow these steps:
- Open regedit by pressing Windows-q, entering regedit.
- 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 8 and everything will be fine now.
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