Last Friday, I was contacted by a local 'non-profit' to "assess" and recommend what options they might have with four donated Latitude E7440 laptops that "..won't boot"..
Having these now in my possession, I find that some 'helpful person' (arguably at the previous owner's insistence) has DELETEDallthe partitions on the 256 GB SSD disks in ALL FOUR laptops... (Just wonderful). Which means, I suppose, that there is no means to restore these (as I might normally expect to do from the 'restore partition') and proceed with Windows 10 upgrades insofar as this 'restore partition' no longer exists (which would be where a new install might retrieve this 'license', right? ).
But I seem to remember having once accomplished something similar with a 'clean install' of Windows since that particular laptop HAD, in fact, been previously activated with Windows 8.1, as were all four of these units. But that was then and I simply don't recall how we (Dell Support and myself) accomplished this (and frankly, since I'm not gettin' paid for this effort, I'm not terribly 'motivated' to spend a boatload of time on extended efforts with Dell Support, as I seem to remember was the case previously..).
Since this non-profit really doesn't have a lot of resources to spend on new licenses, is there no means to 'resurrect' what I'd always thought was an 'embedded' Windows 8 license within the BIOS, or as I've read, a license that is "injected' into the mobo (... uh, believe me, that's not MY term there, I just stumbled across a reference to this on the Dell forums somewhere in the past two hours that I've spent looking into this, and this was how it was 'termed'..).
I suppose I could talk this place into forking over the cost of 'system restore disks', as I've been told are available from Dell, but will this change this scenario..? Do these come with licenses that can be activated? And truthfully, if I don't REALLY have to do this, I'd certainly like to save them even that small expense.