Re install

Hi can any one help me,I have purchased a new hard drive as my old one crashed and is no good. I need to reinstall my windows 8 on the new drive,my problem is I purchased the os as an upgrade of windows 7 on line. I do not have a disk only the product key and date when I purchased the os 8.
How do I go about installing windows 8 on this new drive.
I recently updated the os8 to 8.1 last month.
Regards john

You can do a clean install, but you need to delete the Windows 7 install.

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/13375-clean-install-windows-8-upgrade.html

http://www.eightforums.com/general-discussion/10837-windows-8-eula.html

Microsoft said:

What about upgrading the software? The software covered by this agreement is an upgrade to your existing operating system software, so the upgrade replaces the original software that you are upgrading. You do not retain any rights to the original software after you have upgraded and you may not continue to use it or transfer it in any way. This agreement governs your rights to use the upgrade software and replaces the agreement for the software from which you upgraded. After you complete your upgrade, additional software will be required to playback or record certain types of media, including DVDs.

Click to expand...

You have only one choice-Windows 8 System Builder OEM DVD.

It's slightly awkward since the Windows 8 Pro upgrade you used means that you gave up rights to Windows 7, or the qualifying Windows version you upgraded from.

Since you did not make a Windows 8 upgrade DVD at that time you have no media to perform an install.

Assuming you have access to a working PC with Windows 7 or later you can download the Windows 8 Upgrade, or the Windows 8.1 Upgrade. Once downloaded, you can choose to create media on DVD or USB storage to perform a clean install with.
Upgrade Windows with only a product key - Microsoft Windows Help

This page is still available so I guess you can still obtain Windows 8 in this way. Windows 8.1 64-bit is more restrictive than 8.0 in the hardware it will run on. I would recommend that anyone should create both 8.0 and 8.1 media.

The edition downloaded (Core or Pro) depends on the valid Windows 8 product key you use to start the download. Whether 64- or 32-bit depends on the OS version you use to do the download.

If you wish to download 32-bit versions but have a 64-bit OS, you can run a 32-bit Windows 7 Virtual Machine, and do the download in there.

32-bit Windows 7 VMs are freely available from Microsoft here:

Cross-browser testing simplified | Testing made easier in Internet Explorer | modern.IE

The only 64-bit Windows trial freely available I know about is here:
Download Windows 8.1 Enterprise Evaluation

I am not sure if the Windows 8 upgrades can be downloaded using this OS.

Once you have your install media see:

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2299-clean-install-windows-8-a.html