Original Equipment Manufacturer licenses are preinstalled on a device by a manufacturer to allow use straight from purchase. This will open a window that contains information about your license, including the type of license that it is. You can determine the license you have by opening a command prompt and entering slmgr.vbs /dlv then press enter.

There are three types of Windows Licenses (OEM licenses, Retail licenses and Volume licenses), depending on the type of license that you have, different steps may need to be taken. In the event that you are unable to activate the license, a phone call to Microsoft support will normally resolve these issues. Operating Systems above Windows XP also feature a ‘rearm’ period, which acts as a grace period before reactivation is required. Later versions of Windows take a ‘Reduced Features’ stance to non-activated licenses, this gives users the chance to install the NIC driver then reactivate the Windows license. Instructions will be displayed in the re-activation wizard. The way around this is to use phone activation. For XP era OSs, there is an impasse in the case where you cannot login until the OS is re-activated, but you need to login to install the NIC driver. However, in some rare circumstances it may not be possible to reinstall this driver before reactivating the license.

This means that if the machine that you are restoring to contains a network adapter, that requires specialised drivers, these will have to be manually installed before Windows can be reactivated. When using Macrium ReDeploy to restore an image to dissimilar hardware, only the storage driver will be ‘injected’ into the restored image in order to make it bootable. In order to reactivate your Windows license, you will need access to an internet connection. An example of a significant change to the hardware is restoring an image to a new computer. Windows will check this hardware against the hardware that was present at the time of installation. If a significant change is made to that device’s hardware (motherboard, storage device, NIC, CPU), you will be asked to reactivate that license. When Windows is installed on a device it will associate itself with that device’s hardware. Windows activation is a feature that is designed to verify your copy of Windows is genuine and has not been used on more devices than the Microsoft Licence Agreement allows. A common question we receive is ‘what happens to my Windows license when I restore to new hardware’? There is no easy answer to this question, however, there are several factors that you should consider.

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