Repair decisions.

[Deders]

I'm fixing a laptop for a friend who borrowed it from a friend of his.

The drive is the issue, it won't boot up with it in. For some reason the Sata connections are bent on the drive. Best way I can see to fix this would be to replace the PCB but PCB's are only available from the states and apparently the Rom chip needs to be transferred, requiring a smaller soldering iron than I own.

A cheaper option, due to the PCB replacement costing $49 before postage to UK, would be to buy a new drive, but it is an OEM version of windows 8 and I've never installed 8 as of yet so I'm not sure how the key situation works. There is no key on the back of the laptop.

Is there an easier way to get windows 8 on the machine?

 

[Elixer]

Do you have a pic of the damage?
A PCB swap of the exact same drive in question should fix you up, and there wouldn't be a need to transfer the ROM chip--unless it was encrypted, then you got bigger problems.

IIRC, win 8 has the keys in the BIOS, so, in theory, you would use the same OEM version of the OS, and it will work.
If you don't have backups of the OS, then, you usually need to contact the maker, and they should be able to ship you a DVD with the OS on it for minimal price.