This has a happy ending but it's ridiculous enough and has been aggravating enough to be a #FML. My mother-in-law has an old Toshiba laptop. It never came with a re-install CD, and she never created her own recovery media.
It turns out it had some version of Windows 8 where the key is installed in the firmware or something. Anyway, somehow, the hard drive was formatted. Like, secure erased.
I tried all the usual recovery things, but nothing could find a valid partition to recover - the drive was just genuinely empty. The recovery partition was gone and the recommended recovery media didn't exist.
There's no key to type in on the license sticker for a regular Win8 install, and when we finally found the original packaging which included the Win8 key, a normal Win8 install complained that the key was for a specific OEM version of Windows and won't work for a retail install.
I tried everything. Toshiba couldn't provide a recovery CD because of something about how Toshiba AU is now Dynabook or something :shrug:. Attempts to buy one on ebay failed.
The M-I-L has been laptopless for months now and they were about to buy a new laptop - which had already come with lashings of guilt for not being able to fix the thing.
Anyway, I found a procedure online which apparently let me use a retail install using a dodgy key and convert it to an OEM-key-using edition post-install. I was skeptical, but prepared to try it. So I downloaded the ISO and went hunting for a blank DVD to burn it to.
Side-note: we're moving house in a week and everything I own is in boxes. I could not find blank DVDs. I'm not sure I own them, but I am sure they're not being found before we finish moving, and probably not until we unpack boxes gradually over the next 4 months.
At that point I'll probably confirm that I don't actually own blank DVDs any more. Can you even still buy them?
Being desperate, I decided to try a USB install instead - but most of my USB keys are also packed in boxes, and the few which weren't packed weren't packed because I use them. But ... there was one USB drive in my top drawer. I'd decided to throw it out instead of packing it.
Why? I'd found it in a car park a few months back and I'd been planning to take a look at the contents from a linux boot CD or something in case it was filled with viruses - and the mother-in-law's laptop was running with UBCD in a final attempt to recover the partition.
So I stuck the USB key in to see what spyware-riddled mess it was.
It looked like Windows installation media.
It turned out to be some poor sap's irreplaceable Toshiba recovery media which quite happily installed on the laptop and picked up the firmware Windows key.
What.
