Server 2016 - Skip Product Key failing

[Lagamorph]

Hi all.

 

I know Server 2016 is still in Technical Preview, but we're beginning to do some work on testing deployment via SCCM. Whilst on the whole it's been successful, whenever we do the deployment it hangs at a screen prompting to enter a Product Key. We can manually select the option to Do it later and the deployment continues as normal, but obviously this is hardly a long term workable solution.

Does anyone have any ideas on how we can automatically skip this?

 

Below is my customsettings.ini,

[Settings]
Priority=Default
Properties=MyCustomProperty
 
[Default]
OSInstall=Y
SkipCapture=YES
SkipAdminPassword=YES
AdminPassword=<REMOVED>
SkipProductKey=YES
SkipLocaleSelection=YES
KeyboardLocale=0809:00000809
UserLocale=en-GB
UILanguage=en-GB
Systemlocale=en-GB
SkipTimeZone=YES
TimeZoneName=GMT Standard Time

So we're already telling it to skip the product key there, though the Product Key field is blank in the Apply Windows Settings stage. This has never been a problem for our 2008R2 and 2012R2 deployments. We were simply able to deploy the OS then activate via KMS later.

[anyweb]

is there a pid.txt or similar in the sources folder with the key ?

 

otherwise have you tried specifying the tp key ?

[Lagamorph]

Sorry for the delayed response on this.

 

There is no pid.txt file that I could see unfortunately, though after doing more digging I think I may have found the cause. Apparently with the last few versions of Windows, the installation on a non Volume Licensed copy of Windows cannot automatically bypass the Product Key entry with no product key specified in the Unattend.xml, even when deploying via SCCM, this functionality is only available on Volume License versions. As I'm just using the Windows Server 2016 trial ISO at the moment, which won't be a Volume License version, it may not yet possess the ability to do this automatically.