About a year ago couple bought an HP Midi Tower PC from a well known store really cheap because it had been a display machine, and it has Windows 8 installed. The computer recently started malfunctioning and so they asked us to take a look. First thing we noticed was that there was no PID label on the side, but have since learned that is no longer used for Win 8 machines. They have no disk(s) either, just the machine, but there is a recovery partition on the HDD, from which I was able to 'refresh' the system before giving it back. This was a temp solution, aimed at them getting their personal stuff off, because the hard drive is failing, and indeed the machine stopped working again just a few days after we returned it.
My question is, after putting a new drive in, given that the machine already has the PID hash in the BIOS, is there a way I can get the system back on without them having to buy another copy of Windows 8? OR could they legally put a copy of a different version of Windows on the machine instead ( which is the preferred option), and get that accepted, given that the original for Windows 8 is still in the BIOS, ie, could they override the original PID with one for the new OS??? Please advise.
My question is, after putting a new drive in, given that the machine already has the PID hash in the BIOS, is there a way I can get the system back on without them having to buy another copy of Windows 8? OR could they legally put a copy of a different version of Windows on the machine instead ( which is the preferred option), and get that accepted, given that the original for Windows 8 is still in the BIOS, ie, could they override the original PID with one for the new OS??? Please advise.
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- windows 7