Will Upgrading To WIN 10 Affect My WIN 7 Activation Authority?


  1. Posts : 40
    win 7
       #1

    Will Upgrading To WIN 10 Affect My WIN 7 Activation Authority?







    Will Upgrading To WIN 10 Affect My WIN 7 Activation Authority?

    I have WIN 7 on my SSD1 which I loaded from a WIN 7 OEM Homebuilder's Disk that I purchased.

    I have cloned that SSD1 to another as an emergency backup SSD2, that I keep on the shelf.

    If I allow WIN 10 to Upgrade my computer's SSD1 and 3 months down the road choose to go back to using WIN 7, can I just plug in my WIN 7 cloned SSD2 or will activation of WIN 10 somehow treat my WIN 7 clone as unauthorized?

    I realize I may be able to use the original purchased WIN 7 disk to reinstall it from scratch on SSD1, but I would not want to have to go through all that. And, might that reinstall not work long term either since Microsoft has the original WIN 7 Authorization Code and may have de-authorized it upon the install of WIN 10 (or the passing of the 30 day rollback period . . . which rollback I also would not want to have to do either after reading some of the issues here)?

    I am very hesitant to install WIN 10 without the ability to easily go back to WIN 7 via clone, especially since my current SSD does not even have a System Reserve Partition, let alone the 500mb one WIN 10 seems to require which has caused issues for some who had only had a smaller WIN 7 100mb Reserve Partition, resulting in total boot failure.
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  2. Posts : 15,441
    Windows10
       #2

    A cloned version will work fine and will not even need to be reactivated.
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  3. Posts : 40
    win 7
    Thread Starter
       #3

    cereberus said:
    A cloned version will work fine and will not even need to be reactivated.
    Are you saying a WIN 7 Activation code will always be usable for WIN 7 (even if that WIN 7 OS has been upgraded to WIN 10 and activated as an upgraded WIN 10 and the 30 day rollback option period is expired)? Is there any Microsoft or other site that you may be aware of that gets into more details of this ? Thanks
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  4. Posts : 15,441
    Windows10
       #4

    poolmon said:
    Are you saying a WIN 7 Activation code will always be usable for WIN 7 (even if that WIN 7 OS has been upgraded to WIN 10 and activated as an upgraded WIN 10 and the 30 day rollback option period is expired)? Is there any Microsoft or other site that you may be aware of that gets into more details of this ? Thanks
    A cloned copy is an exact copy - you have the right to reuse your old key at any time - the only rule is you cannot both at same time.

    It will work. Equally, you can reinstall Windows 10 on same pc/mobo at any time in future.
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  5. Posts : 18,424
    Windows 11 Pro
       #5

    poolmon said:
    Is there any Microsoft or other site that you may be aware of that gets into more details of this ? Thanks
    Recovery options in Windows 10 - Windows Help


    Click the last link on this page, "Go back to your previous version of Windows" and read the points under "If go back isn't available"

    Going back to the cloned Windows 7 would be exactly the same as restoring a factory image - you would just be using your cloning software to do it instead.
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