I gave up on recovering my hard drive from a crash that corrupted my entire drive.
I went ahead and bought a new copy of Windows 8.
Affter I bought it, I preinstalled Window WinXP to ensure that it will go smoothly.
Installation went smoothly, and when it was done it told me to activate.
I got a valid key from my trusted hardware store, and I checked if it's the official Win8 by comparing the MD5 hashes with the ones on the Microsoft website.
What did I do wrong?