Samsung laptop - aargh!

[Cambridge PC Support]

Jeez I hate Samsung laptops now!

I've got one in at the moment with a dying HDD. Won't boot into Win8.1, she took it to PCWorld who just did a Refresh on it for £50, which worked for a whole day!

Can't get the thing to boot off a stick, so out comes the drive and onto the bench machine to confirm the dying HDD and get the data off.

Pop a new HDD in, and start looking around to buy a recovery media. There is none, you have to send the whole laptop to an authorized Samsung service centre, nice!

Right, I'll not let it beat me. Put old HDD back in, and do a Restore to Factory, then download and install the Recovery software and create a recovery USB stick.

I get it to finally boot from my stick and then it complains that it can't find the image, lovely!

OK, let's see if I can clone the old HDD to the new one and work the recovery partition. Acronis 2011 doesn't like GPT disks, so tried a trial of Easeus Todo backup which did

Boot it all up and it kicks out some .efi error. But then manage to get the recovery stick to boot and it manages to find the image! Recovery complete and f**k my old boots it's working

 

[Kitten Kong]

Nice one kev.

Least its working mate. How about Genner Sales for the recovery media?

 

[Cambridge PC Support]

All sold out, and they don't do Win 8 by the looks of it.

Pretty crap of Samsung not to supply them. And also that you have to jump through hoops to create the recovery media when most other laptops badger you to create them when you first boot them up

 

[johnrobert]

Last time I had this problem and come to think about it, it was a Samsung laptop
It was a while ago
I got a torrent for OEM windows 8 used serial it came with to install
Then extracted serial from bios to activate

Some people will frown on torrents but in these difficult win8 times any port in a storm

OEM windows 8 has to exact same version as laptop

 

[Altster]

Don't blame Samsung! It's that crappy software company who is at fault!

 

[Dave1320]

I have a question I should probably already know, but is it against any laws or tos to use an image of an OS and apply the COA serial?

 

[johnrobert]

I am sure it is against the rules but sometimes to have to do what you have to do