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I bought a HP Pavilion and before I even powered it up I replaced the supplied hard drive with a flash drive and loaded Linux Mint onto it. The laptop didn’t like the new OS, saying “Selected boot image did not Authenticate. Press Enter to Continue”, but the solution was to disable Secure Boot.

I thought using Windows 8 elsewhere would be handy, and plugged the 2.5 SATA drive into a desktop computer (having removed all other drives) and the computer wouldn't boot. No error message. Just nothing.

Why can't I boot some other computer using the Windows 8 drive from my laptop?

Is there licensing and signing at work here? If I can't use this operating system, how much did I pay for it and how do I get my money back?

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  • Does the new PC use UEFI or BIOS? Plus I think this might be related to an encrypted hard drive.
    – Mario
    Commented Sep 29, 2013 at 11:07

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Won't work. Due to technical AND legal reasons.
The technical restrictions enforce the legal reason.

A pre-installed Windows 8 license is NOT transferable to another computer.
(The EULA explains this. Did you read it ?)

To enforce this a pre-installed Windows 8 (as came with your laptop) requires an UEFI BIOS containing the proper security certificates that match with the factory install on the harddisk.

It will only work with Secure Boot enabled and on the SAME hardware.
(Same hardware usually means same brand/model/revision, but it can be as restrictive as "only this particular laptop". It depends on how the hardware manufacturer set it up.)

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