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roy_battyFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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taking image of Windows 8 OEM when key is embedded in BIOS

I have 4 new identical Dell PCs. The were supposed to come with Windows 8.1 pre-installed but with downgrade rights to Windows 7.

What we actually got was 4 PCs with Windows 7. The Windows 8 install media was included.

So I did a fresh install of Windows 8 onto one PC. I was not asked for a licence key at any point so I presume this is because the licence key that was embedded in the BIOS was used automatically.

I would now like to build up this one PC and take an image using Acronis. Will I then have any problems loading this image onto the other 3 PCs. Will each of those machines use the licence key embedded in their respective BIOSs.
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Quarm

You are correct in your thinking as the licence it taken care of in the bios. You can use Belarc Advisor to show you the licence for backup or if you want to do a clean installation of Windows 10 later
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John
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☠ MASQ ☠

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I would run the sysprep command before you do the cloning....
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Regarding duplicate SIDs:
As the article referenced states, there may not be a problem with duplicate SIDs (with very rare exceptions) but there is still a need for the use of SysPrep.  The article was arguing for the use of SysPrep and against the (unnecessary) use of NewSID.
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Thanks for the advice here guys. I'm presuming that really if I want to do this properly I need to purchase a volume licence for each of these machines. That way I wont have these issues.