Windows 10: Activating windows 10 after major hardware change help

I still have a lot of that old hardware in the graveyard in my back garage including a good amount of old memory. Can't give it away. I really need to purge it. Getting ready for my system upgrade but still kicking around what direction to go.

 

I still have old I mean ""OLD" ide boat anchor 4 device ribbon cables lingering around here somewhere(probably like steel straps due to age) as well as one or two floppy drives! In fact when running a few VM projects when 7 was new I had tossed a floppy drive since the old Legacy versions required the floppy media while still trying to get a bootable floppy type media images going.

One 3.1 was a real joy trying to get the number #1 floppy to work after all these years! I originally bought the six 1.44mb floppy disk set after first getting into an old IBM 386 museum piece for sure even back then! *Roflmao2

I had to fit the 3.5" floppy drive into a 5 1/4" drive bay adapter since the small drive on the used system was wiped clean actually zeroed out quite well by the pro who was running a custom system building business back then. And later the same adapter at least was used on the Vista to become 7 beta and RC build. Later the power supply took the board along with it when that case went doa on me. I swapped brands for both board and supply for the present build which then saw everything moved from the first case to a newer version by the same brand afterwards and now sees 10 running on it! *Smile

I remember one time someone couldn't figure out why I would swap out a brand new dvd burner for another new drive after I explained the older model drive had a longer casing that pushed up against the board! The newer model had a short casing instead like most do now anyways. The older drives were about 1.25 to 1.5" longer reaching the newer atx boards being seen at the time.

 

I just now went through the MB change adventure, as my previous one got fried by the PS. As I understand it after talking to MS Support when the new MB did not activate, when you upgrade the equivalent of the key is based on the current MB. Change that, even for same MB model, and you're no longer activated. So what I ended up doing which worked great is:

1. Made an image of my current Win 10 system drive (I have a 2-SSD raid 0), which wouldn't activate but Win 10 was fully functional.
2. Restored my last Win 8.1 image and let it activate the new MB (it activated after the second reboot).
3. Did a base upgrade of the old 8.1 to Win 10 with the media-tool-created ISO.
4. When the upgrade was finished and Win 10 was activated, I restored my current Win 10 image.
5. My up-to-date Win 10 image was then activated.

Life is good again.

 

The MS servers recorded the new activation which allowed the restored image to activate itself automatically. You had to see 8.1 activated to the new board regardless of whether it was an image or clean install. You more or less "lucked out" seeing the 8.1 image activate itself there however knowing 7 wouldn't have without calling in to MS! Had to when getting this build together and swapping the first set of memory out since the dimms stood up higher bumping the oversized heat sink pushing up on one side and removing the Mushkin Enhanced for the Kingston Hyper X at the time.

Yet when having keep two of the four original dimms for the second mini tower running 7 there I swapped the Mushkin out of that case for Kingston Fury upping it from 4 to 8gb at the same time and within a day both the 10 install that also became deactivated as well as not seeing 7 deactivate was a relief. Ironically the first 500gb drive was one of the three that came out of the old Vista to 7 build where I had removed a 500gb out of the WD Passport external case and saw installed internally running with both flavors of the 7 beta and RC builds until the launch and awaiting SP1 when the board went with the supply simultaneously which seems to be a flaky supply with a weak cap on the board being a bad mix.

 

My first home box in the very early 90's was an 386 SX AT clone with a math co processer on DOS and Windows 3/3.1 with a huge 2 MB or maybe 2 - 1MB simm cards for ram and EGA graphics a 14" NEC color CRT monitor and a 9600 Baud Modem .
I put another 2 MB ram in it and VGA video bigger hdd and an 14.4 modem it was still slow but better . The 486 DX 100 later was much better.

I dont miss the old boards,drivers ,patches ,IDE hdd's ,dip switches .IRQ conflicts and the old ISA ,IDE and other older hardware ,floppies or dial up modems or modem strings , or the old socket 7 and super 7 boards ,K6 /K62 /K6 + Overclocked Celron 300A's ,AGP GPU's AND 9X windows etc etc .

I used to be a serial upgrader ☻☻ I have a k10 Phenom II x4 ,Core Duo and 1 SB i7 configiuration and an SB i7 Elitebook here now and the old boat anchor P4 XP box out in the storage shed that actually ran XP reasonably well with 4GB ram .

The younsters dont know how easy they have it now with plug and play,broadband x TB hdds and windows NT OS like win 10 or the others . ofc Windows 10 updating HDWE drivers out of hand wouldent be missed *Zip

 

Hey, my first "home PC" had relays, switches and light bulbs. And I can't say I miss loading OS-2 from 28 floppies and having the 25th one crap out. I like my Win 10 water cooled workstation much better *Biggrin.

 

Interesting - and good to hear that it worked for you...

 

The OEM key is good for one machine unless it breaks and you own the replacement outright to have MS activate the new machine when you call in. If you sell the machine the disk goes with it automatically! This is why a number of custom pc shops will tend to use volume licensing or pay extra to include the media with each new system sold. But they may buy the OEM type disks in large numbers.

Now speaking about old clunkers I have one for you! Talking about work? Dos was easy compared to writing each and every program you ran on a tiny lcd screen with the Epson HX-20 notebook computer first seen out back in 1982! Talk about vintage that being the first I owned having worked on some 70 of them while in school for Electronics.. The teacher who had started off back in '68 with IBM had a pair of 286s along with a single 386 students used to resumes' at the time.

When one local company decided to upgrade all the sales people, some foremans out in the factory, etc. with updated laptops the 10yr. old clunkers got dropped in my lap! No one else even wanted to look at them! Some were in rough shape and most ended up simply being stripped for parts in order to get a number of the best shape models in working order to hand out. Later someone from the sales dept. came looking for one since they needed to look something old. I almost bought one when first seen at one place that carried all the new stuff including CB radios and scanners being an electronics specialty shop back in early 82 when those were just out and ran up close to $400. I think $379.99 was the list on those. They ran off of micro cassette tapes where you stored the programs you had to write up yourself while some sample programs as well as early prewrote programs were available separately.

Following the Dos/3.1 days that's when life became much easier since I could still run the 16bit dos apps in the Dos mode 95 brought in through a window or shutdown to dos mode for a few 8bit run lately on DosBOX of all things! I wouldn't know about 28 5.25" floppies are as installing the OS since the Epsons lacked any but of the six 3.5" disks Disk #1 went on my when trying to get 3.1 installed on a VM for old times sake back when 7 was first new in RC form by then as the XP Mode second release was out which saw the Virtual PC 2007 rolled up in one single download rather then the need to install the VPC first and go for the XP Mode separately as first seen.

Now you see options like VM Player, Virtual Box, Hyper-V that can actually work things much better as well as VM Player but for any of those old pre-XP versions your best shot is 9x, ME, 2000 rather then task it would take at this time to see boot floppy images made up as long as the particular program supports running the older versions however. Pre-XP leaves Hyper-V out!

 

I appreciate that this thread is quite old now (95 days) but I felt that it may be helpful to post my experience on here. I upgraded from W7 (an upgrade version) to W10 in August. Just before Christmas, I decided to upgrade to Skylake, however I read on various forums that there would be a problem with activation. I read some of the advice on here and took precautions before I undertook the upgrade. After the motherboard, cpu and memory were installed, I connected my W10 SSD and switched on. Everything booted as normal and when I went into settings and checked, it showed W10 as being activated. I then cloned my W10 installation onto a larger SSD and tried again, and everything worked fine.