Hey guys, got a somewhat unique situation and I'm wondering if anyone has had success with this. In a nutshell, I have a base image for a few work PCs that I have here, which have a bunch of tweaks and preloaded software. This base image has the Win10 Home KMS key installed, which prior to the TH2 10586 update, I would use the GenuineTicket.xml method and the retail upgrade key. This has worked fine, and still works fine. Saying that, I have a few machines here that have issues (bad disks, won't boot etc) and I'd like to be able restore this Win10 image and activate it using the attached Win7 key without installing Win7 first and running the gatherosstate.exe to get my GenuineTicket.xml file. I understand that as of TH2, it will accept (and I presume, convert) Win7/8 keys during the setup wizard, but not after the fact. Running changepk.exe to change my product key after Windows 10 has been installed will return an error saying that this licence is not valid to activate my version of Windows 10 If anyone can shed some light on this, let me know.
Why overcomplicate things? Just use the default key, at most you'll have to generate 1 ticket per PC and you'll have a digital entitlement. AFAIK you can change the product key offline using DISM.
I'm not quite sure you understood what I'm trying to do... I want to avoid having to install Windows 7. I have a PC with Windows 7 licence and Windows 10 Image. I want to load the image, change key from default and directly activate Windows 10 with the Windows 7 key. Is there a way around this? I'm not using Sysprep at the moment but I suppose I could make that happen if that was necessary.
I don't know whether or not this info helps you out, but I recently installed W10 1511 clean with generic retail key. After the OS was up, I entered a previously unused W8 key and it activated without problem. You mentioned KMS key, but what channel the W7 key was? Maybe you should switch channel (slmgr) before trying to enter that old key on the UI.
Fair point. I had Win10 Home trying to install with an OEM Win7 Home Premium key. I also tried with an OEM Win7 Professional key but I probably had to upgrade first before that would work. I'll have a play around. The default key I used is actually the default retail key, not KMS, sorry.
Update: No problems activating Windows 10 with Windows 7 or 8 keys now. I just had to ensure that I was on the right retail upgrade channel before adding the product key. It essentially builds a digital entitlement on the spot.
What exactly do you mean with "ensure to be on the right upgrade channel"? I cannot activate W10 1511 (installed with default generic key H8Q99) by entering the W8.1 key that is in the MSDM table (Win 8.1 RTM Core OEMM). I'm getting error 0xc004f210
could be the reason why it never worked, i only have a lot of oem keys activated now using 8HVX7 (activation was gone after cloning from hdd to ssd, that's why i tried to activate using the 8.1 key)
