Windows 10 activation.

lorddenis · 05 Dec 2015

In january I bought a new pc. And my friend put a licenced windows 8.1. Then came the upgrade to windows 10. And evrything was ok. A while after I got windows 10 I had to get a new mother board (my old one died) and now it say's in the right corner that i have to activate windows.

I tried the help desk and other forums and they said that the only way was to re-instal win 8.1 activate it and then upgrade to win 10. is there any other way ?
I read something about a activation fix that microsoft will release?

Thank you for your time.

Superfly · 05 Dec 2015

Enter your Win 8 key (assuming it's retail and has transferability)

With the new version there is no need to go through the whole upgrade malarky.

lorddenis · 05 Dec 2015

Did that and I got this error: 0xc004e016 (i trible checked and the key was entered properly).

Superfly · 05 Dec 2015

The key is not valid for the edition you installed.

Assuming you have 10586 installed, run ShowKey to check your key edition first.

Also run this in Powershell:
slmgr -dlv

lorddenis · 05 Dec 2015

Windows Product Key Information

Product Name: Windows 10 Pro

Product ID: 00330-80000-00000-AA728

Installed Key: *****-*****-*****-*****-3V66T

Original Key: *****-*****-*****-*****-F3JKB (this is the one i got for the win 8.1 i entered this one)

Original Edition: Win 8.1 RTM Professional Retail

OEM Key: OEM key not present in firmware

in the attachments is the other thing:

Superfly · 05 Dec 2015

Update to edition 10586 to activate... otherwise you have to go through the whole update routine (from Win8).

lorddenis · 05 Dec 2015

Thank you ! did the update (it was a long one). After it was done I entered the code and it activared.

Thank you again for your time and patience.

rsburks · 02 Dec 2017

I find this thread interesting since the key numbers I found on my new laptop are exactly the same. I just purchased a refurb HP Elitebook from Newegg originally with Win 7 but refurb'd with Win 10 Pro with a valid COA sticker but the sticker is missing several characters as if there was a pull tab on it to hide these characters on purpose. And when I exposed the key it was exactly what is show in this tread. But when I rec'd the laptop and tried to add additional users it required me to active the OS which promptly failed. Any idea what I might be doing wrong? Of course the COA does not match the key embedded in the OS but here is the KEY that I did find. Prod Code: 00330-80000-00000-aa678 / KEY: vk7jg-nphtm-c97jm-9mpgt-3v66t. The COA on the sticker is missing the first two segments. It seems to me like the first part should be somewhat standard but I have had no luck finding anything close to try. The COA looks like this. the question marks show the characters that are missing and I have purposely excluded the last section for security reasons. X????-????H-XCY8C-9FYPK-<removed>. if you have any suggestions on the missing "????-????" characters it would be helpful. -AudioXTC

essenbe · 02 Dec 2017

@rsburks, you may be better off starting a new thread in this section. This thread is 2 years old.

Superfly · 02 Dec 2017

rsburks said:

I find this thread interesting since the key numbers I found on my new laptop are exactly the same. I just purchased a refurb HP Elitebook from Newegg originally with Win 7 but refurb'd with Win 10 Pro with a valid COA sticker but the sticker is missing several characters as if there was a pull tab on it to hide these characters on purpose. And when I exposed the key it was exactly what is show in this tread. But when I rec'd the laptop and tried to add additional users it required me to active the OS which promptly failed. Any idea what I might be doing wrong? Of course the COA does not match the key embedded in the OS but here is the KEY that I did find. Prod Code: 00330-80000-00000-aa678 / KEY: vk7jg-nphtm-c97jm-9mpgt-3v66t. The COA on the sticker is missing the first two segments. It seems to me like the first part should be somewhat standard but I have had no luck finding anything close to try. The COA looks like this. the question marks show the characters that are missing and I have purposely excluded the last section for security reasons. X????-????H-XCY8C-9FYPK-<removed>. if you have any suggestions on the missing "????-????" characters it would be helpful. -AudioXTC

There are 110 075 314 176 key combinations to find those missing chars. With Win 7 key checking taking up to 40 sec (on my PC) with ShowKeyPlus, looping through them is easy, but it will take ~140 years to check all.

So unless we get access to a super-computer at NASA...