Reinstall of Win8 upgrade

[Norway Pad]

Ok, so this is the dumbest question I have ever asked here. But anyway..

Tempted by the introduction offer on the Win8 upgrade and the uselessness of my Vista licenses, I bought an upgrade that I put on one of my T60s. I installed it on an old mechanical drive just to see how I liked Win8, and planned to reinstall it on an Intel SSD later if I chose to stick with Win8. Then the old mechanical drive suddenly died, and the move to SSD needs to happen sooner than I planned for. But in the process, it dawned to me that I have never worked with an upgrade-OS before, just full license OSs. So what will the correct reinstall path for the Win8 upgrade be? Do I need to reinstall Vista first, register it with the Vista key, and then run the Win8 upgrade disk and enter the upgrade license? I assumed the Vista key is "gone" and useless as soon as it is sacrificed for upgrading?

Thanks for any answer!

[craigmontHunter]

No, you do not need to install vista first. You can do a clean installation with the media, however you may run into an issue activating windows, in which case you should be able to just activate over the phone rather than over the internet.

[yak]

I also bought an upgrade but wanted to have a clean system. Turns out it's rather straight forward:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQyxD-ifsGo

Btw, I bought mine online on microsoft.com

[QWERTY Andreas]

You got a mail with a license and a link to run the updrage assistant.

Run the upgrade assistant on another computer, and choose to create a bootable media instead of installing it right away

Use the bootable media in your T61 with the empty SSD, and enter the code from the email. Then you are good to go!

[yak]

You got a mail with a license and a link to run the updrage assistant.

Run the upgrade assistant on another computer, and choose to create a bootable media instead of installing it right away

Use the bootable media in your T61 with the empty SSD, and enter the code from the email. Then you are good to go!

Yes but after that Windows may not be able to activate itself. You have to change one key in registry. The video I linked talks about this.

[Norway Pad]

Thank you for the feedback guys, and sorry for the late feedback from me.

I actually bought the Win8 Upgrade install DVDs when I purchased the upgrade from Microsoft. I assume these will equal the bootable media you can create from the upgrade assistant, so I should be fine there.

It didn't appear that the install on top of the older OS cluttered Win8 as much as I think upgrades used to do. So Win8 seemed fine even if it was done that way. But if I do a clean install on my SSD, it will probably be the best. I will watch the full video later today. But my question is: Is the registry change described a legitimate "hack", or can it create issues later when Win update is run or something? From research I have done, I got to the same answer as you guys also give: that you can install directly from the upgrade media, but you won't be able to activate unless you call Microsoft and mess around there for a while. So that will be the one potential problem connected to this. And which leaves me asking if that problem might or might not should be circumvented with the registry change.

[yak]

I did that back in January and had no problems with it whatsoever. I wouldn't worry about that.

[Norway Pad]

I had to travel to yak's home country last week, so it took a while before I got to try this out. But I can verify that everything worked out. I changed the OOBE / MediaBootInstall bit value in the registry and ran the script, and Win8 Upgrade activated just fine from a clean install.

I am however a little surprised that such a possibility is left open by MS. Unless there are limitations to the upgrade versions in ways that I am not aware of yet, the upgrade version will basically work just like a more expensive regular version. No need to install another OS first, and all that hassle. So good for me and everyone else who used the limited time offer for upgrades: We got very cheap Win8 licenses.

[jessepit]

Thanks this post help me a lot.