Windows Activation question

[Quantum_Effectz]

I bought my PC a long time ago, and it came with windows 10 with a physical activation key, later I upgraded my pc and replaced everything besides my SSD, HDD and Graphics Card, I used a fresh install of windows (I checked before the reinstall and found the activation was then linked to my Microsoft account), and had no issues when re-activating windows. Later on I upgraded to Windows 11, no fresh install this time, again no issues. My HDD failed a while later and I needed to do a fresh install of windows 11 on the SSD, again all with no issues.

 

Recently I wanted to use my old pc parts to run home assistant, so I bought a new SSD for my main PC and planned to use the old one to create a HA installation. So while installing windows 11 on the new SSD, I logged into my Microsoft account but after the instillation completed, windows gave me an error when trying to activate with the digital license linked to my Microsoft Account. I tried restarting, troubleshooting, updating windows, even doing a complete reinstall, still the same error and windows being not activated. When I booted from the old SSD, windows booted fine and the old install remained activated.

 

I found the old Physical key to activate windows and decided to try and use that to activate windows on the new install and it worked, windows activated just fine and when I checked in settings, it said that activation was linked to a physical key.

Now comes my question. I noticed that the old install of windows also remained activated, with a digital licence linked to my Microsoft account. so now I seem to have two installations of windows that both seem to be activated, one digital licence and the other a physical key, But both licences should be from the original windows 10 key. Are both these instillations valid? If so, should I just keep the old install and then run Home Assistant using VirtualBox?

[Needfuldoer]

1 minute ago, Quantum_Effectz said:

Are both these instillations valid?

No. You are licensed for one copy of Windows.

 

You could stretch and say it's a gray area if you only run one PC at a time, but in my opinion the only 100% above board option is to buy a second license so both your PCs have one.

[Quantum_Effectz]

7 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

No. You are licensed for one copy of Windows.

 

You could stretch and say it's a gray area if you only run one PC at a time, but in my opinion the only 100% above board option is to buy a second license so both your PCs have one.

I don't really need two Windows PCs, originally I was just going to use HA OS, or maybe Linux, but when I saw the activation was different I was unsure. so if its invalid I think il just format one of the drives, which version of Windows should I get rid of? 

[ItTakes2ToMango]

9 minutes ago, Quantum_Effectz said:

 which version of Windows should I get rid of? 

Whichever one you like less

[Needfuldoer]

9 minutes ago, Quantum_Effectz said:

I don't really need two Windows PCs, originally I was just going to use HA OS, or maybe Linux, but when I saw the activation was different I was unsure. so if its invalid I think il just format one of the drives, which version of Windows should I get rid of? 

Keep Windows on your daily driver PC, run some form of Linux or another on your home server.

[Tetras]

26 minutes ago, Quantum_Effectz said:

Now comes my question. I noticed that the old install of windows also remained activated, with a digital licence linked to my Microsoft account. so now I seem to have two installations of windows that both seem to be activated, one digital licence and the other a physical key, But both licences should be from the original windows 10 key. Are both these instillations valid? If so, should I just keep the old install and then run Home Assistant using VirtualBox?

I believe a digital license used to use your key to register the hardware with Microsoft and from then onwards the motherboard would automatically activate when you install Windows, but since the Windows 7/8 keys have been deactivated, I'm not sure exactly how this works anymore. I suspect your physical key won't continue to activate multiple installations, whereas it was previously possible for one key to do this. I'm not referring to them being "valid" installs on the license terms, just if it successfully activated.

[Quantum_Effectz]

15 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Keep Windows on your daily driver PC, run some form of Linux or another on your home server.

 

16 minutes ago, ItTakes2ToMango said:

Whichever one you like less

In that case, is there a way to move a Windows instillation, because I would like to use the new drive for my daily driver PC, however the new Drive has the installation with the physical key (the one I like least), so I would like to transfer the digital license from the old drive to the new drive, but as I said in the main post I always got an error when trying to activate that way

[Quantum_Effectz]

15 minutes ago, Tetras said:

I suspect your physical key won't continue to activate multiple installations

So since I already used it now, it shouldn't work to activate again? I believe the physical key was also an OEM key and I read somewhere that OEM keys cant be reused multiple times but i wasn't sure about that.

[Eigenvektor]

21 minutes ago, Quantum_Effectz said:

So since I already used it now, it shouldn't work to activate again? I believe the physical key was also an OEM key and I read somewhere that OEM keys cant be reused multiple times but i wasn't sure about that.

If you use a physical key to activate Windows 10 or 11, it gets automatically turned into a digital one and the physical one stops working, afaik. The digital key is then bound to your Microsoft account if you have one (you can also was create one later and sign in with it). In your Microsoft account you can unbind the license from one PC and assign it to another.

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/reactivating-windows-after-a-hardware-change-2c0e962a-f04c-145b-6ead-fb3fc72b6665#ID0EBD=Windows_11