How to recover factory settings from winUCRD.wim folder saved on an external HDD

[miso72]

I have a hp 250 g3 laptop which originally came with a pre-installed windows 8.1 home (Win 8.1 RTM CoreConnected OEM:DM) . Later I upgraded to Windows 10 and deleted the Recovery partition, but I saved the winUCRD.wim folder on an external HDD. Windows 10 has never been running smoothly on this laptop and now I would like to reinstall the preinstalled Windows 8.1. I tried downloading Windows 8.1 and creating a bootable DVD, but it always asked me for a licence key although I have the key embedded in BIOS. Now I have Windows 10 with 2 newly created partitions and the original Windows 8.1 winUCRD.wim folder on an external HDD. How can I use this winUCRD windows image to get rid of Windows 10 and reinstall Windows 8.1 which originally came with this laptop?

[WAWood]

@miso72 

I know it's not answering your question, but you could try using this utility to retrieve the product key and seeing if that then works with Win8.1: https://www.tenforums.com/software-apps/2577-showkeyplus.html

Good Luck

[miso72]

Thank you for your help, but I have already tried with the OEM key retrieved by a similar tool and the key was not accepted.

[WAWood]

@miso72 

Different tools retrieve different keys.  The other tools get them from the Registry. This the only tool I know that actually gets the key from the Firmware.

[miso72]

The key is identical.

[WAWood]

@miso72 

OK, then I don't know what else to say.