so here's the story.
i had a liquid cooler i wanted to install last night, so i shut down my computer and installed updates. i installed the cooler. turned it on and went into the UEFI to check the temps. while i was perusing i noticed the windows 8 features were not turned on, so i set it to 'Windows 8 WHQL' and also set the PCIe to gen 3 from auto because why not. when i went back into windows it now has the Windows 8.1 build 9600 watermark and is deactivated. the activation app says this key is being used by another computer. i enter my key and get the message 'this key is invalid.
i set the UEFI back to the original settings and uninstalled the updates but they key is still invalid. i can't believe that a simple UEFI change would do this, i mean it's all the same hardware with the same serial numbers, i didn't even yank out my CPU.
i searched online and found some command prompt fixes which didn't work. the 'sfc /snannow' command brings back a message about corruption that could not be fixed. the other steps are to refresh windows, which i don't have time for because i need to rip the .iso onto a thumb drive using a different computer (i got an H440 case and no DVD drive) because of some missing files and i'm heading to work very shortly.
Has anyone had this problem? i don't see any results on google about a correlation between UEFI settings and deactivating windows, just wondering if anyone else has had this experience.