Hello,
Heres the deal. I bought this laptop (Lenovo G500s) with Windows 8 in it on 27th July 2013. 1 and a half years I used it without any problems until 3 days ago when I found that my Windows 8.1 (Single Language) had suddenly deactivated itself after a restart. Windows is now asking me to give a product key which I didnt have because Windows came with this laptop. However I used a software that I found online that extracted the product key of my windows from the BIOS and gave it to me. This key I fed into the activate windows bar (slui 3) but it says that there is something wrong with this key, try again later.
Next, I contacted Microsoft Support and got to chat with a representative who remote accessed my PC to see what was wrong. She tried to run slui 4 but as it turns out, windows on my computer cannot be activated by phone. She then realized that the product key that I have is a Volume License Key. So she gave me a number that I should call to get windows activated. I called this number three times and the people who picked up told me that I should rather post a question here because they dont deal with Volume License keys.
I ran an internet search to find a method on my own to solve this problem. Someone suggested that I run a system restore so I went ahead and tried that. I wanted to go back to the last critical update of Windows 8.1 which was clearly before this problem started. I have no idea why but system restore failed. Some file could not be accessed properly and because of this the system restore had failed.
I also opened command prompt as administrator and ran sfc /scannow to see if there were any corrupted files on my pc ( another method that was suggested online). After running this command, I got an error that says - 'Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them. Details are included in the CBS.log' .
What I want to know is -
1. How to activate my windows so that things go back to normal ?
2. Why was this problem caused and what I can do to avoid it in the future?
Thanks a lot.
Ram.
