Lets say your hard drive dies. Or you want to upgrade your hard drive to an SSD drive or a higher capacity hard drive. How do you create a usb flash drive install for this purpose?
According to what I am reading, you need:
A Windows 7 machine with the same configuration as the machine you're working on, which I don't have, to run the setup program.
A product key, which only seems to be retrievable by third party programs that invalidate the warranty when used.
A product key that is not OEM, which I don't have. OEM product keys are not accepted by the setup program.
How do I reinstall Windows 8 in this instance? Without buying a retail version of Windows 8?