Reinstalling Windows 8 OEM on Lenovo G400s

One of the first things that I did before altering my system on the brand new Lenovo was to install all the updates for Windows 8. After that I rebooted the system and ran Clonezilla to save an image of my hard disk on to a removable drive so that I can restore the laptop to its original state in case I were to mess up anything. Once that was done, the first thing to do was to try and reinstall Win 8. Why? Oh, just for fun to see whether it is doable. I don't see why I must pay for a new license to get Windows 8 DVD for reinstallation (which was what the salesperson told me) when I have already have a proper legal license to use it on my laptop.

I followed the instructions from mydigitallife forum.

1.  Ran "slmgr.vbs /dlv" in Command Prompt and I found that the SKU for my Windows 8 was CoreSingleLanguage. 

For CoreSingleLanguage you need: 

Win 8 RTM CoreSingleLanguage OEM.iso

SHA1: 8C6345E4AE37BD64911F2B2AA243ED604BBBE922

I won't be providing links to the iso. It can be found at the forum or via Google.

2. Burned the ISO on to a DVD and booted up the DVD.

3. Installed Win 8 and followed the instructions on the screen. 

4. Win 8 was installed successfully.

BUT... yes, there is a but. After the installation of Win 8, I was left with an operating system which allowed me to access the hard disk, the programs on it and to use USB drives. Other than that, no other drivers were detected and installed. Yes, no wired and wireless ethernet, no sound, no sdcard, zilch. I downloaded the ethernet driver from Lenovo website with another laptop and managed to get the internet connection going. The moment the internet connection was up, Windows 8 was activated automatically. That was what I wanted to know - whether Win 8 can be activated using the hardcoded key in my laptop. 

So, after that was done, I booted up Clonezilla and restored the hard disk to the image that I saved. It was too much trouble to search for, download and install all the necessary drivers. 

Target 1 of reinstalling Win 8 and getting it activated was achieved. 

Next: To repartition the drive on Windows 8 to make space for Linux.