Lenovo MIIX 300 recover factory win 8.1 after win 10 install

Question

I want to somehow recover the factory Windows 8.1 on a Lonovo MIIX 300-10IBY 80NR.

A good friend asked me to do this after an IT guy installed Win 10 pro to the machine and it obviously can't be activated.

The previous Win install was deleted so you can't simply roll back. Another nice touch is that there is now a secondary recovery partition on the drive and who knows wats that because thats only 450MB and the factory recovery partition is 5.31GB which is still on the drive.

When you hit the recovery option in the firmware it throws a 0x000000F error so thats a no go. If I'm correct the MS downladable Win 8.1 ISOs won't accept the embeded OEM OS key so thats also a no go.

Is there anything I can do to get the original Win 8.1 back?

Answer 1

There was an issue a while ago where the downloaded ISOs did not work with OEM keys. Using a retail ISO would work though. If you can find one of those, it should accept the OEM key. The last time I had to install Win8.1 (several years ago) I'm fairly certain that I just used the embedded OEM key and it worked, but I can't prove it.

I would say try the recent MS Media Creation Tool and see. If the computer doesn't work now, it's not going to make it any worse and there's a chance it will work with the OEM key.

Officially, you should contact the manufacturer for support on this issue. There may be a cost involved, since they may want to ship you physical restore discs, but there's a chance that they have downloads available by now. You might also be able to talk to Microsoft support and have them either generate a bypass key or provide you with a link to download appropriate media. However, this is unlikely because they will usually just immediately tell you to contact the computer manufacturer.