Help with Win10 upgrades with OEM licenses

[aparis99]

Windows 7 machines had CD Keys, Win8/10 don't since they're 'embedded'. My understanding is that they have a full key or partial key and when you activate after an upgrade, it generates a unique key for Microsoft's database with your hardware and you're good to go with a clean install or whatever in the future.

We have about 75 machines that have Win8/10 licenses, but came from Dell with Win7 installed. All of our OS licenses are OEM. We've been upgrading some with the CD from Dell, another handful with a USB Key via the Media Creation Tool (build 10586), and finally imported an SCCM Task Sequence from Microsoft for an In Place Upgrade (build 10240). That works great, but come to find out none of them are activating! When looking at them, we see they've all got the same Win10 generic key ending in T83GX, and of course activation gives a "DNS error".

Can anyone explain what's going on here? Am assuming this SCCM upgrade has this generic key embedded somewhere and not pulling the info from the OS it's being installed on...

[dinci5]

Their activation is a mess.

 

You should be able to do a clean install of Windows 10 and activate it with a Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 product key.

-> Same version of Win 10 as Win 7 or 8.1 (you cannot activate Win 10 Pro with a Win 7 Home product key).

 

We tried the same, but it doesn't work for all devices with all keys.

It's so confusing and frustrating.

 

Try extracting the key from the BIOS and just use that one to activate Windows 10.

 

To get the key from the bios open CMD:

wmic path softwarelicensingservice get oa3xoriginalproductkey

-> This command will give you the embedded product key

 

The do the following in cmd to activate Windows with that key:

 

Uninstall current product key:

slmgr /upk

 

Clear product key from the registry:

slmgr /cpky

 

Install new product key (that you've extracted)

slmgr /ipk XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

 

Activate Windows:

slmgr /ato

 

----

 

For me, this works most of the times, but it doesn't always accept correct, legal product keys.

You can use ShowKeyPlus to check to which Windows version a product key belongs:

http://www.tenforums.com/software-apps/2577-showkey.html