win 10 COAs & registration etc

Hi, I have one win 7 system and two win 8 systems.

In essence I did a win 10 clean install, and as I had no new COA from MS, I assumed I could use my Win8.1 COA.

Wrong!

I am wondering if this is because of 2 possible reasons. (i) Although I pre-registered all three systems at different times, I only received one confirmation email from MS. Only one system appeared to register correctly, the other two when clicking on the task bar win10 icon just said already registered although no email address was requested in these two occasions, and no links are subsequently available. Or (ii) Although I have one confo email from MS, I have not received any further email advising or inviting me to download win 10 (is it possible that such an email would provide a COA?)

I would be grateful if someone could tell me what the process should be, and whether there is a glitch in regard the two other systems.

Bunny is correct!

*tosses carrot*

Several people have not realized that you must first upgrade an existing valid activated OS to tag your key to windows 10 properly, then you can blow away the older os.

Those people had to restore their original os and then do the upgrade, then blow it away once windows 10 was activated.

Thank you guys, makes sense from Microsoft's point of view - but not mine.

I need to retain the older system for support purposes - I currently run multi-boot systems for that purpose.

Since I am fresh onto Win10, could you guys advise if the following would work.. I am assuming (maybe incorrectly) that for example if I clone the wine 8.1 system and then upgrade to win 10 that would work? Or does the win 8.1 COA become defunct for future requirements?

Thanks in advance for sharing yr expertise.

robmar0se said:

Thank you guys, makes sense from Microsoft's point of view - but not mine.

I need to retain the older system for support purposes - I currently run multi-boot systems for that purpose.

That is not legally allowed. You have only one license, and may only install one instance at a time. So, if you upgrade to 10, you must delete your instance of 8 (this happens automatically during the upgrade). You are allowed a backup, but not an installation.

Likewise, if you go back to 8, you must delete the 10 installation. Your only other legal alternative is to buy a second license to have both installed at the same time.

This is spelled out very clearly in the EULA, which you probably didn't read.

Mystere - thank you for that - you are correct it would never dawn on me that MS would make this restriction - most people would not wish to retain the old system, unless they were fearful of another Vista/8 catastrophe!

However you may not have read that I need to run all OS for support reasons, and I believe it is MS, my and customer interests to do so.

But back to the original issue - COAs. I have reinstalled 10 over 8 and of course no COA is requested, nor does it appear that it is explicitly given. Of course Magic Jelly Bean does retrieve a COA. It occurs to me that when reinstalls are required (eg HDD fail) we do need the COA. So my question is, what is the legal way to recover the win 10 COA for upgraded PCs (I am focusing on those systems where the COA is not embedded in the BIOS, that's a different question)?

Thanks so much.

yes I do mean the product key!

Here's the scenario upgrade to win 10 and the hdd goes phutt. Without the win10 product key, assuming there is no system image (retail rarely do this), the alternative is to do re-install of win 7/8 from the recovery partition if still there, and then reinstall win 10 over - crazy!

It seams to me that MS has no intention of giving out the win 10 product key so that a custom install could be done from the iso version. Am I right?

So why have the option of a custom install, unless its only there for the other fully paid versions?