A friend has brought me an Acer Aspire E15 complaining that they cannot get it to boot. The laptop is telling me that it needs to be repaired with recovery media because the boot file is missing information. Of course, they never created any recovery media. Since I have never needed to do a full install of Windows 8 without having backups available, I have to ask: Will the embedded product key still register if I use the Microsoft website to create a new installation usb? Of do I need to start contacting support numbers? Is there any other alternative way to deal with this problem? I can't even check to see if the laptop has a viable recovery partition.