A customer brought me an Inspiron 17R 5720 to refurbish for them. I'm assuming it came pre-loaded with either Windows 8 or 8.1 judging by the lack of product key under the battery and the Windows 8 logo on the bottom. The parts list on Dell's support site using the service tag even says it came with Windows 8 recovery media. The user said they had upgraded it to Windows 10 at some point.
The hard drive was failing so I replaced it. The problem I'm having is there doesn't seem to be a Windows 8, 8.1, or 10 product key. This has been confirmed by 3rd party software which extracts the product key from the BIOS and by Microsoft's activation support, who connected to the laptop and executed something in Command Prompt which turned up nothing. Microsoft's activation support told me I needed to contact Dell to have them give me the product key for the laptop which is laughable.
I've never had this issue before and I'm at a loss as to what to do other than tell my customer that they have to purchase a copy of Windows for me to install. The question is, what happened? I know Microsoft stopped with the sticker COA's and they're somehow embedded in the motherboard's BIOS, but nothing I use seems to turn up anything. Secure boot and UEFI are both enabled in the BIOS.
Is there something else I could try to see what happened to the product key? I should also mention the customer no longer has the recovery media. I tried using a Dell 8.1 disc that I had lying around, but I still get the same issue with activation and no product key found.
Any help is appreciated.