Hoping that someone has worked this out. I manage over 100 laptops. We use W10 Home on the laptops because the laptops are not on the domain at HQ. When I have an out of warranty HDD failure, I want to swap the old HDD with an SSD and perform a fresh install of W10 on the SSD. I keep running into issues with the bios or windows licensing stopping me.
It's all honest, even willing to pay for a Windows licence if I have to...how is it done?
Thanks
Windows licensing should not be stopping you. When you upgrade a computer from a properly activated Windows 7/8/8.1, a digital entitlement gets stored on Microsoft activation servers. The digital entitlement is matched to the unique hardware ID of that computer. Simply upgrading from a HDD to an SSD should not affect the unique hardware ID. When a fresh install of Windows 10 is done on that same computer the hardware ID is sent to Microsoft activation servers where it is matched to the digital entitlement stored there and retrieved, activating Windows 10.
Here is what I would suggest:
First make sure your computers are activated with a digital entitlement and have the generic Windows 10 Home product key. Running a 10586 build of Windows if you go to the activation screen under settings, updates and security, it will say activated with digital entitlement. Run showkey plus from this forum:
Showkey - Windows 10 Forums
Verify the Windows 10 product key is the generic key for Home:
YTMG3-N6DKC-DKB77-7M9GH-8HVX7
If your computers are activated with a digital entitlement and using the generic product key, then I would suggest putting that generic product key in a pid.txt file:
Windows Setup Edition Configuration and Product ID Files (EI.cfg and PID.txt)
[PID]
Value=YTMG3-N6DKC-DKB77-7M9GH-8HVX7
The pid.txt file gets saved in the sources directory of the Windows 10 install media. That will cause Windows 10 to install Windows 10 Home and not ask for a product key. It should then activate when connected to the internet by retrieving the previously stored digital entitlement.
Can't help with the bios issues.
Thanks for the knowledge. I've give that a shot!
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