Upgrading into Windows 8.1

Friday, October 25. 2013

Why does everything have to be updated via download? That's completely fucked up! In the good old days you could download an ISO-image and update when you wanted and as many things you needed. The same plague is in Mac OS X, Windows, all important applications. I hate this!

Getting a Windows 8.1 upgrade was annoying since it failed to upgrade my laptop. It really didn't explain what happened, it said "failed rolling back". Then I bumped into an article "How to download the Windows 8.1 ISO using your Windows 8 retail key". Nice! Good stuff there. I did that and got the file.

Next thing I do is take my trustworthy Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool to create a bootable USB-stick from the 8.1 upgrade ISO-file. A boot from the stick and got into installer which said that this is not the way to do the upgrade. Come on! Second boot back to Windows 8 and start the upgrade from the USB-stick said that "Setup has failed to validate the product key". I googled that and found a second article about getting the ISO-file (Windows 8.1 Tip: Download a Windows 8.1 ISO with a Windows 8 Product Key), which had a comment from Mr. Robin Tick had a solution for this. Create the sources\ei.cfg-file into the USB-stick with contents:

[EditionID]
Professional
[Channel]
Retail
[VL]
0

Then the upgrade started to roll my way. To my amazement my BitLocker didn't make much of a stopper for the upgrade to proceed. It didn't much ask for the PIN-code or anything, but went trough all the upgrade stages: Installing, Detecting devices, Applying PC settings, Setting up a few more things, Getting ready and it was ready to go. It was refreshing to experience success after the initial failure. I'm guessing that the BitLocked made the downloaded upgrade to fail.

Next thing I tried was to upgrade my office PC. It is a Dell OptiPlex with OEM Windows 8. Goddamn it! It did the upgrade, but at that point my OEM Windows 8 was converted into a retail Windows 8.1. Was that really necessary? How much of an effort would that be to simply upgrade the operating system? Or at least give me a warning, that in order to proceed with the upgrade the OEM status will be lost. Come on Microsoft!

by Jari Turkia in Windows at 05:42 | Comments (20) | Share in LinkedIn

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thanks on :

Thanks dude, it worked!
Comment (1)

Jari Turkia on :

You're most welcome.
Comments (9)

emma on :

I tried ugrading me win 8 to 8.1 with CD and it keeps telling me "setup has failed to validate the product key"
Comment (1)

Jari Turkia on :

Can you provide any more details? How did you initiate the upgrade or did you do a fresh install?
Comments (9)

Anonymous on :

can you give me a link of that file ?
Comments (2)

Jari Turkia on :

Sure! Well ... erhm ... which file did you want a link to?
Comments (9)

Anonymous on :

Thank you.
Comments (2)

Jari Turkia on :

Sure thing. I'm glad to be of assistance.
Comments (9)

Arrizal on :

sorry, what is that mean :
"[EditionID]
Professional
[Channel]
Retail
[VL]
0 "

it mean edition id should professional or can change it? could you give more explanation??

Thank you. Sorry for my bad english, I'm still study.
Comment (1)

Jari Turkia on :

You can change it if your product key is for some other edition. The original article said Professional and since my product key is for Windows 8 Professional, that's why I have that in the ei.cfg. I urge you to put the correct edition into the ei.cfg-file, unless you don't want to do a complete re-install.
Comments (9)

Mariano on :

damn.. Thanks so much man!
Comment (1)

Jack H. on :

Just chiming in to say THANK YOU. Stupid 8.0 wouldn't update, even with a custom 8.1 ISO file. I edited the EI file and all finally went through without a hitch!!

THANK YOU AGAIN.
Comment (1)

Jari Turkia on :

You're welcome. I solve various issues on computers on daily basis (others call it work, ), all I do is share my findings with everybody.
Comments (9)

Mark on :

Can I get a download link to the Windows 8.1 Home ISO. I have an OEM product key which is refused by Microsoft's "installers" because it's not "retail" and Windows Store keeps restarting the download for no reason. Microsoft's very own technicians (including a supervisor) can't even figure it out and they've been contacted twice about the same problem and they refuse to give me direct access to it so I can upgrade without using up my data allowance. One reason piracy exists, companies are to retarded to make the upgrade process easy for OEM users.
Comment (1)

Jari Turkia on :

Copy protection (also the theft gates in stores) are only to make honest people's life more difficult. The protection is so weak, that criminals will get past those anyway.

So, I have to agree with companies totally missing a very important point in piracy.
Comments (9)

Bijay Pakhrin on :

It worked!! Thank you so much for this awesome article.
Comment (1)

Jari Turkia on :

You're welcome. Glad to be of help.
Comments (9)

Ricks on :

Simple and effective! Installing right now.
CHEERS!
Comment (1)

Aashish Bhatia on :

Hi sir,
Can you please give me the download link of the file..
Please create it and give the download link..
So that i should be able to paste that file in my dvd.!
Currently using windows 8 pro..
And getting error message that Something happened
Failed to validate the product key..
Thanks in advance..
Comment (1)

Jari Turkia on :

Which file are you referring to? All download links are at the article.
Comments (9)

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