Nothing wrong here. You can swap drives until your fingers fall off. Everything else remained unchanged.
I don't know. This is the 2nd time I've heard of someone being able to transfer hard drive to a different system and remain activated. I think they're using a different method for online activation. I think it downloads a cert or ticket or something. I've been snooping on this, but it's a fairly complicated thing to nail down. If you're really curious, you can do before/after checks in a VM using regshot and some detective work. The hard part is that the system accesses/modifies like a million things while just doing every day stuff. So it's not a simple before/after check. You have to figure out which things are important and which are not. Edit: My bad misunderstood OP
Wait.... If you use KMS activation, you can change anything you want on your PC. This because all KMS applications create a task to start (re)activation every time the PC reboot or startup.
No I didn't use any KMS activation. Upgraded from permanently licensed Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 10 Pro. Then clean installed.
he OS fron one HDD to an other HDD on the same computer! As I'd understand the OP, he told that he used Acronis for to imaging/clone/transfer the content (OS etc.) from one HDD to an other HDD on the same machine! Or am I wrong with my understanding of what the OP wrote:
if it were KMS activate the output would not give a permanent activation message since KMS machines are only activated 180 days by design
That maybe would happen if more than 3 Hardware components (exclude the Mainboard) would be changed at the same time on the same machine!
You are right! For the time being, I am on same PC. I will now try to move this hard drive on another PC and check the result.... Thanks! This should sum it up!
You may be right over the years I have been successful calling Microsoft to reactivate after a hard drive chang Hardware changes If you made substantial hardware changes to your PC, such as replacing your hard drive or motherboard, Windows might no longer be activated on your PC. For info on how to activate your PC, see the product activation article Looking at the posted links on Hardware Changes it says Substantial Hardware Changes so we know need to know what substantial hardware changes refers to with reference to windows 10
In my experiences, Two main component changes will break the activation, the components are : mainboard and processor, even you use the same identical brand and type of mainboard and processor combination but different to your original hardware, activation broken, but now there is one factor more that can break the activation, it is the Graphic Card, if you change from Nvidia to Amd or AMD to Nvidia, there is a chance your activation broken.
Unless this have changed now but couple of experiments done moving hard drive to another PC same Dell brand and series different board de-atviates it.
Oh my bad. I thought that he switched hardware, not just hard drive. This would still be in tolerance as Hard drive serial is only a single strike IIRC.
Considering how often HDDs fail, it wouldnt even make sense for HW ID to be based off HDD serial numbers. So nothing unusual here.