Activating Windows 10 installation

salilsurendran · 20 Dec 2015

Hello,
I bought a new laptop with Windows 7 Pro on it and it was upgradable to Windows 10. However, the upgrade failed. Also my new laptop had a HDD so I replaced it with my old SSD. I installed Windows 10 from USB doing a clean install. However, it doesn't activate. I entered a Windows 7 Home Premium Key that I had from my previous laptop but that doesn't get activated and I get a 0xC004F050 error. How can I obtain the Windows 7 Pro key necessary to activate from the old HDD lying outside of any computer? Do I have to put it back into my laptop?

Word Man · 20 Dec 2015

Welcome to TenForums, salilsurendran.

Unless the Windows 7 Home Premium from your previous laptop was a Retail licensed purchase (as opposed to OEM/System Builder), it's only licensed to that previous laptop. Even if it was Retail, you can't be using it on two different machines at the same time.

Short of reinstalling the old HDD, assuming you had a legitimate copy of Windows 7 Pro on the new laptop, there may well be a Certificate of Authenticity (COA) somewhere like on the bottom of the laptop that would be useable for the upgrade/clean install, unless IT's been blocked due to abuse or excessive use.

Ztruker · 20 Dec 2015

If the laptop came with Windows 7 Pro then the COA sticker should have a Windows 7 Pro key on it and it should work when you clean install a recent (build 10586) ISO. Why are you giving it a Windows 7 Home Premium key? If you don't see a COA sticker, look under the battery.

salilsurendran · 23 Dec 2015

Ztruker said:

If the laptop came with Windows 7 Pro then the COA sticker should have a Windows 7 Pro key on it and it should work when you clean install a recent (build 10586) ISO. Why are you giving it a Windows 7 Home Premium key? If you don't see a COA sticker, look under the battery.

No I looked everywhere. There is no COA sticker. I have the latest build but it doesn't accept the key. Windows 7 Home Premium key was what it had on my old laptop. I even called Lenovo support and they extracted the key from my motherboard but that is not accepted either.

Superfly · 23 Dec 2015

I'm not sure how Lenovo managed to exctract a Win 7 key from the mobo - that's kinda impossible as there is no key there, but anyway - without the COA sticker, you will have to go back to an activated Win 7 from which you need to get a genuine ticket in order to upgrade, if you do not have a retail key. You can check the edition of your key(s) with ShowKeyPlus.

salilsurendran · 23 Dec 2015

the problem was that I had upgraded my Windows 10 to Build 10586 but hadn't restarted the machine so it was refusing to accept the key. Once I restarted Windows 10 automatically activated. Problem solved.