Upon first boot (with windows 8 activated fine) I made a recovery USB boot disk of windows, then removed the factory HDD, replaced with my SSD, and installed windows using the recovery USB (UEFI)
Even though windows 8 installed fine on the SSD without asking for a key (as its in the bios), when I boot windows it says it can't be activated, saying key is blocked??
(I tried two methods to install windows 8 on the SSD, first creating recovery USB via standard windows process, second using the Asus backtracker tool, both the same result)
So I call Asus support, spoke to someone very hard to understand, but after some discussion, the answer was windows 8 was only activated on my laptop for the original hardware (not SSD), and I would need to pay $90+ and send my laptop to Asus repair to have windows 8 "re-imaged" onto the laptop with SSD.
This is crazy!
This process worked perfectly fine on my old dell laptop.
Now I'm stuck with a 4 day old laptop that I can't use my SSD in.
Any suggestions? (other than having to spend more money and purchasing a separate windows license).
