"Activate Windows" error 0x8007007B

Bree said:

The only remaining mystery is why a Reset turned it into Enterprise. @Superfly's sugestion that "reset uses the recovery partition - someone must have changed that to Enterprise" seems the most likely explanation, especially if this was a second hand machine that had once been used in a business.

To prevent a recurrence of the Enterprise' problem it would probably be best to do a clean install, select 'Custom install', then delete all existing partitions. Then install Windows into the empty space created.

That would make sense - I did buy this as a used laptop. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "delete all existing partitions. Then install Windows into the empty space created." Will it be clear once I start the process of doing a clean install?

adripendleton said:

That would make sense - I did buy this as a used laptop. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "delete all existing partitions. Then install Windows into the empty space created." Will it be clear once I start the process of doing a clean install?

After you select the Custom Install option during the clean install, you will be given a list of physical drives and partitions. Select each partition on the drive you want to install Windows 10 to (probably the only drive in your system), and click delete until you are left with nothing but one large unallocated space. Highlight the unallocated space and click next and Windows setup will set up the partitions on the drive for you.

Note that this wipes the hard drive clean and you will lose EVERYTHING on it!

If you can get Enterprise to downgrade to Pro using the info I provided earlier - to prevent Enterprise from installing again from a recovery partition, I would just delete the existing recovery partition and, if you want, replace it with your own recovery partition. Or on the next version upgrade of Windows 10 pushed out by Windows Update, it would likely create it's own recovery partition anyway.

I would imagine your HDD is probably a mess of partitions, but that can be cleaned up with MiniTool Partition Wizard Free fairly easily.

adripendleton said:

That would make sense - I did buy this as a used laptop. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "delete all existing partitions. Then install Windows into the empty space created." Will it be clear once I start the process of doing a clean install?

It should become clear if you read through this first: Clean Install Windows 10 | Tutorials

Here are some images from that tutorial. When you boot from the install media you can choose to do a Custom install.



You will then be able to select each existing partition and delete it until the whole disk is 'unallocated space'. Then install windows into this empty space.



But read the tutorial first, the above is just a brief 'taster', the tutorial has full step-by-step instructions.

NavyLCDR said:

...Note that this wipes the hard drive clean and you will lose EVERYTHING on it!
If you can get Enterprise to downgrade to Pro using the info I provided earlier - to prevent Enterprise from installing again from a recovery partition, I would just delete the existing recovery partition....

It may be a sensible idea try the downgrade to Pro first, if only to give you time to consider your options carefully. If you have had Pro running previously the generic Pro key should work.

Bree said:

It may be a sensible idea try the downgrade to Pro first, if only to give you time to consider your options carefully. If you have had Pro running previously the generic Pro key should work.

I just tried downgrading with the generic key, as shown in the tutorial, but got an error that says Windows can't be activated because I don't have a valid license or key. I guess I'll have to try doing a clean install

adripendleton said:

I just tried downgrading with the generic key, as shown in the tutorial, but got an error that says Windows can't be activated because I don't have a valid license or key. I guess I'll have to try doing a clean install

Did you try downgrading with the Windows 8 product key provided by Showkey? And did you only try just changing the product key, or did you also try changing the registry entries?

Okay, I went back into settings to look at the Activation tab, and this is what I'm seeing now. I haven't done a wipe/reinstall yet, but it's now saying that I have 10 Pro even though it told me the key was wrong when I had tried entering it.

I decided to just do the clean install, and as required I downloaded the windows 10 installation for a USB drive. I followed the instructions here:

Create Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 10

And I do what it says all the way until downloading it to the 8gb USB drive. It downloads all the way to 99%, but then when it should be finished, I get this error:

adripendleton said:

Create Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 10

Have you tried option 2 there?