topic Dissatisfied with Sony Support - Windows 8 Reinstall in PCs & Accessories

Dissatisfied with Sony Support - Windows 8 Reinstall

mike_coreit — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 18:43:16 GMT

Hi my client has a SVE1512C5E laptop with Win8. About a year back my client had the hard drive replaced by Sony while it was still within warranty. The drive failed again, but the machine is still within warranty.

My client wanted me to replace the drive and re-install Win8 as he says he had a bad experience with Sony the last time it was repaired.

I spoke to Sony support before carrying out the work (I expected to receive some helpful advice). However when I spoke with them they told me the Windows license was built on to the failed hard drive; and I would either need to purchase a replacement Windows license, or I would need to purchase their reinstall media for £50. I don't see why Sony would charge for the media in this situation as it still had a warranty.

I insisted to Sony support that the Windows product key was stored within the ACPI/MSDM table, but they would not acknowledge this. They would not give me any helpful advice whatsoever other than buying the same software that the machine originally came with.

I hope others in this situation find it helpful that I was able to replace the drive and find out myself how to do the reinstall:

I used a 3rd party utility to extract the key from the BIOS, then disabled UEFI, and used a Windows 8 disk with a custom ei.cfg file to re-install Windows.

Sony could have saved me a lot of hassle just by telling me this process.

Re: Dissatisfied with Sony Support - Windows 8 Reinstall

BlueTrin — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 12:28:21 GMT

Can you explain to me how you did this ?

Re: Dissatisfied with Sony Support - Windows 8 Reinstall

mike_coreit — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 20:28:13 GMT

Hi in regards to creating the ei.cfg boot disc you will find many guides by searching 'windows 8 ei.cfg'

Note that it does require you to have a legal copy of the Windows 8 disc.

The results for 'windows 8 extract msdm key' are also helpful (I ended up having to install a "trial" version of win8 in order to run the product key utility). I have since heard it is also possible to dump the ACPI table with Linux software.

Re: Dissatisfied with Sony Support - Windows 8 Reinstall

yasfgcs — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 20:32:36 GMT

I am having similar problems with Windows 8 crashing often and unable to start up. Windows 8 refresh results in no access to the C: drive. This has happened 4 times at least since I got the laptop in June 2013. I keep telling Sony it must be a hardware fault, they just reinstalled Windows and returned it to me, and now it has crashed again. Thanks for posting I will use this as an example. I have the SVE1513C5E.
Sony have been really unhelpful so far, wonder how common this fault is.