Windows 10: I have been warned a ASrock BIOS update could erase my OEM Windows key.

I have extracted the keys from the devices in advance. Using two methods one being WMIC. Both methods got the same result. Will this facilitate reactivating my windows if necessary? Are there other steps I should take before attempting the BIOS update? What do I do with the keys I extracted if I have a problem? This is in preparation for a Win10pro to Win11 pro update.Thanks, Dave

:)

 

Question On OEM Windows clean install......

"Flavors" of Windows licenses

Windows can be a little "odd" about license keys. There are at least 4 categories:

• Retail
• OEM
• Volume (electronic download)
• Corporate (no key needed)

For guaranteed success, the license key and media should be in the same category. If you have retail media, you may not be able to install it using an OEM or Volume license key, even though the key is valid for that version of Windows. *Wtf :wtf: Apparently, this is part of Microsoft's anti-piracy scheme (i.e., all customers are guilty until proven innocent).

 

Windows 10 License Key no longer matches BIOS OEM key

We have been mass deploying new Lenovo Windows 10 PCS, using the Sysprep utility to prepare the image for mass deployment. The biggest concern we had going in was that we preserve the OEM license key.

This seemed to be working fine, we created our base image, sysprep'd the machine and captured the image. After deploying the image to a new PC, we went through the setup wizard, licensing, personalization, etc. and checked to make sure the OEM key was still
in place (it was). After initial deployment we inevitably had additional Windows Updates which we applied before putting them into production.

We deployed 25 or so PCs in this manner and without warning the 5 most recent roll outs are reporting a Microsoft License Key which is different than the BIOS stored OEM key. The one thing we did differently on these 5 machines was that we connected to them
with RDP to do the final setup before putting them into production.

When I tried to recreate this issue to see what step was causing the License key to change I was unable to recreate the failure. I followed the same steps we used on previous deployments, stopping at each step along the way to check and compare the license
keys. I did these tests directly on the PC as opposed to RDP.

Does anyone have any idea what would cause this, how to prevent it or is there any cause for concern?

Thanks,

Brian

 

Updating Bios on a M2N-E SLI

It wont update it stops during the "erasing block" step any help?