STONE NT310-H laptop - hard drive replacement

This post is as much for my own records as anything else. This fine Stone laptop came back to me having been dropped. Symptoms were permanent hang on the boot-up splash screen and an unpleasant clicking sound coming from the hard drive. The OS was/is Windows 8. Diagnosis - knackered hard drive. Having obtained a replacement drive (same WD Blue but 500GB rather than 320), I set about the repair.

Here's the laptop from the top.

The hard drive is accessed by removing the two screws and small panel from underneath:

Ta da!

The hard drive is just wedged in. The two screws towards the right-hand side simply hold the plastic dust cover on. The top side of the drive has some foam pieces on it to take up the space in the enclosure: 

It's about as budget as humanly possible...

Here are the old and new drives (with the foam pieces swapped over):

So, with the new drive slotted into place, I re-fitted the cover. Easy. But what about re-installing the OS? I knew from a previous pic I'd taken that the machine had been running Windows 8.1 before it went wrong. But with the old hard drive broken, it was impossible to check for the license key and Windows 8 machines don't have COA stickers. What to do? I started the machine:

Eh? So I ducked into the BIOS (F2 on start-up). Turns out this machine is running UEFI. Since I've never had to deal with that before I did a bit of reading. The good news was that the Windows 8 key was hidden somewhere in the BIOS. The bad news was that I had no idea which version of Windows 8 was previously running and installing the wrong one would mean the key stored in the BIOS would not work. So I took the plunge with bog-standard Windows 8.1. I downloaded the ISO direct from Microsoft (by way of the Media Creation Tool). I then burned the ISO to a USB stick using Rufus and the special settings required for UEFI: 

Installation went smoothly (with these details in mind) but it did ask me for a key. This meant I was on the wrong version of Windows 8. I continued with the install using a key borrowed from this site. 

The installation completed and Windows 8 was up and running. I then ran ShowKeyPlus with the following results. You can see which key I used to get the install done. You can also see the actual OEM license key on the machine and which version of Windows 8 I should have installed:

So, I went through the process again but first downloaded Windows 8.1Pro from Microsoft for the install. No key was required during the install and once up and running, ShowKeyPlus returned the following result and Windows activated itself:

Happy days. I ran windows update and the first thing it suggested was the free upgrade to Windows 10. Obviously, this was always on the cards and having obtained consent from the owner, I'm putting the laptop through that process now:

More soon, no doubt...

D 

[Update - the upgrade to Windows 10 Pro went without a hitch]