[SOLVED] How does the activation process actually work?

clarkey1984

Distinguished
Feb 13, 2014
56
1
18,545
Hi all, my boss has given me his old HP ay03na laptop, for the very reasonable price of free, the only caveat being that I need to fix it, the hideous 5400rpm HDD is toast, and I mean properly dead, as in it physically prevents my kaby lake desktop rig from booting if I connect it as a 2nd drive, it's wrecked.

The reason I wished to connect it to the pc is because I wanted to run a product key finder on it to extract it, as I have a new sshd coming for it, however with no way of getting the key I'm unsure of what windows intends to do in terms of activating on a fresh drive.

I'm not that up to speed on how it all works exactly, but my new i5 rig, my partner's dad's pc, and my parents one that I also built all show as activated by a license linked to their corresponding Microsoft accounts, so I'm sure you can see my problem here, as once I reinstall on the new drive I'm not sure how it's going to be able to tie the installation to anything licensing wise, unless it goes by hardware, although if it did that then why would the other three machines I've worked on be done by Microsoft account.

I just don't wish to be in a position where I show up as non genuine with it just because I've had to change the drive and haven't got access to the key.

Does anyone have any ideas of what's what, or am I worrying over nothing and it'll just work?

Many thanks in advance :)
 
Solution
A reinstall on a new drive, in the same system, should incur NO activation issues.
Install, and it should activate itself when it goes online later.

During the install, when it asks...you skip entering the license key.
Also, you do this install on the new drive with the system offline completely.

clarkey1984

Distinguished
Feb 13, 2014
56
1
18,545
Thanks very much, that's good to know, and it was a toss up between using the sshd I've ordered or to keep that for my kaby lake build and use the intel 320 series proper SSD that's in there in the laptop, but then again I game on the desktop and the laptop will only be for my partner to use as she's recently enrolled on a college course, but if the activation thing works as easy as that I can always swap it out for a proper SSD once I can afford it
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
A reinstall on a new drive, in the same system, should incur NO activation issues.
Install, and it should activate itself when it goes online later.

During the install, when it asks...you skip entering the license key.
Also, you do this install on the new drive with the system offline completely.
 
Solution