I volunteered, and I now wish I hadn't, to upgrade a relative's Windows 8 machine - an Aspire One 725 - to 8.1. Either that process, or a later update, has made the machine virtually unusable, so I now want to restore to factory settings. It turned out that the upgrade process had wiped the recovery partition. Accepting that I should have made recovery disks first, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase them from Acer.
Having taken the money from my account, they have emailed me a form which asks for the product keys on the COA label. They had previously told me that they didn't need the first, 25-digit, key but they did need the second, 14-digit, one. However there is no COA label on the machine. I emailed the Amazon Marketplace seller and was told that it might be in the box or the BIOS. Nothing came with the machine and further research suggests that Windows 8 machines aren't shipped with COA labels anyway, so that leaves the BIOS.
I know keyfinder programs are available but there seems to be some doubt that they will find a valid key, rather than a mass-installation one. If Acer create disks with an invalid key I don't expect I'll get my money back, and I'll be no nearer to solving the problem. Also I'm not really clear what this 14-digit key is as I don't remember inputting it when installing Windows in the past.
If anyone can help me get the required key I'd really appreciate it.
