Here's the situation:

We have a work laptop. I upgraded it to Windows 10. All was well with the world. A few months later we decide we want to use said laptop for something else. The software has issues with Win 10. So now we want to rollback to Win 8. One of my colleagues decided that he would do the downgrade. However the 30 day rollback limit has loooong gone. Also, it's proving difficult to locate any kind of system/recovery disk that may(or may not) have been provided with the laptop. Also, there is no licence key sticker on the base of the laptop (it's an alienware) - apparently since Win 8, the licence is registered to hardware, so they stopped putting the keys on stickers?

I suggested to him what we should be able to do...which is download the windows media creation software for Win 8, and get that on a flash drive. Install windows 8 from that. As the laptop was running Windows 8 in the past, the Win 8 licence should be registered to the hardware. So once windows it is installed, it's a case of skipping the "enter licence" dialogue, and then just activating windows once connected to the internet?

He's said that it was just asking for a licence key. I want to check with you guys, as I don't know what his technical ability is, whether he is correct and we can't finish the install without a Win 8 licence key entered, or whether he didn't know to look for an alternative option as it's not a new installation of Windows on new hardware...I've not had any direct involvement so can't confirm for another week...

Any idea if upgrading to win 10 will have changed the key in the bios? And if so will the key be what it was before if I reinstall windows.

Annoyingly the boss (who the laptop was sent to) is busy and also says no recovery media was sent etc.

I think when I installed win 10 I might have formatted the recovery partition too...

Awesome, we'll try hooking out the key from in Windows 10 and seeing if that works.

I think when I installed win 10 I upgraded, but then did something to basically do a fresh complete install.

Trying to get something from Alienware/Dell is  last resort, as I didn't buy the laptop, I suspect the boss would have to do all that and he's mega busy.

Will give it a go next week. For some reason I'm thinking when I was presented with partition options...I chose to format them all and have one single partition. Which with hindsight would be quite stupid.

Will report back next week!

The windows 10 upgrader keeps the old installation for 30 days, allowing you to rollback easily. After that it deletes the folders.

Yeah the installer isn't the issue, it's the lack of a physical windows licence key. Hopefully one of the free programs out there that can read the key in the BIOS will work!

An update.

Produkey worked, but we ended up not needing the key afterall. I sat down with my colleague and we worked through it together.

First of all tried the windows installation media from within Win10, where the first thing it does is ask for a key, which worked, but the actual install failed. Quick google told me we'd need to install it from boot. So did that. Went flawlessly and never asked for the key. Now back on Win 8.1

havn't done it myself, but I know a few people who have :-)