![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When a key is initially activated, a "fingerprint" of the system's hardware is stored with Microsoft so that it will be recognized if Windows ever has to be reinstalled on that system. If on the other hand you're getting stuck at online activation rather than installation (or you find you have trouble there too), then if you've replaced your hard drive 3 times, that may be why the key won't activate anymore. That definitely supports installing without providing a product key (though you'll still need one to activate it later), and since updating to Windows 8.1 is the first thing a Windows 8 installation would want to do anyway, you may as well start there. Another thing you may want to try is starting with Windows 8.1, which you can download directly from Microsoft here. You should have an "I don't have a product key" option in Windows Setup that allows you to skip that, although that might not have existed for Windows 8 I can't remember anymore. If you haven't already, try skipping the product key during initial installation and just try to activate it later, since it's possible that online activation will work even if the installer won't accept the key for some reason. There's nothing Dell can do about that, and in fact if you're seeing this problem during Windows Setup as opposed to when trying to activate online, then nobody is blocking anything because your system isn't even trying to perform an online activation during installation, which means it wouldn't have any way of knowing if a key had been "blocked". I'm not sure what whoever you talked to at Microsoft meant by saying Dell had to "unblock" your key. Dell is correct that they don't control Microsoft's product key activation. ![]()
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