Cloning secure boot windows 8 HP laptop to SSD??

[Watwatwat]

Have an hp laptop giving me grief. I got an ssd and want to migrate to it, but I've been reading about how secure boot might screw up cloning. So I bought some HP recovery discs off the internet because HP in its infinite widsom no longer includes recovery manager in its installs. It installed windows fine, didn't ask for a cd key, I connected to the internet and it failed activation, said the key was blocked. But how is that so? Isn't the key part of the bios in these factory windows 8 install machines?

I downloaded windows 8.1 through the media creation tool which was even more trouble because that one does ask for a key, I used the generic oem key and again, once in windows it fails activation.

So anyone successfully clone one of these machines successfully or found a way to get it to activate right with a recovery disk? The original drive is much larger than the ssd so I kind of loath to clone it esp with all the possible problems I'm reading about, and how few "free" cloning software allow for selective clones.

 

[Bubbaleone]

Regardless of the manufacturer; before you can do anything involving changes to the factory Windows installation or any type of hardware changes, you first need to disable secure boot in the BIOS/UEFI setup utility. Once secure boot has been disabled; make any desired changes (this would include cloning), then boot into Windows to check that everything functions correctly. When you're satisfied with the results go back into BIOS/UEFI and re-enable secure boot, if you wish.

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[Watwatwat]

Ack I figured it out, it was home, not professional, my bad ...