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Activating Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB
Someone in my office setup a box for some internal monitoring work, and for whatever reason decided Windows 10 would be a good idea. In particular Windows 10 Enterprise 2016 LTSB.
90 days later and the trial has expired and we need to activate it.
We have a MS Volume Licensing agreement so it would seem that we have some keys available... but none of them seem to work.
It would have been preferable have this all installed on Windows Server box instead of 10, but now it's already configured, rather not go through the hassle of changing it.
Anyone know why the volume keys aren't working, or can offer a suggestion to resolve this? If I must buy another key, fine, but I'm concerned that the problem is deeper than that. Anyone have any ideas?
Comments
If you installed the trial version, you'll have to re-install to get the full version. No way to upgrade between the trial and the real thing afaik.
This should explain:
https://download.microsoft.com/download/2/d/1/2d14fe17-66c2-4d4c-af73-e122930b60f6/windows-10-volume-licensing-guide.pdf
You can manually change some registry strings, then do an in-place upgrade to proper LTSB. It's a pain though, and certainly not officially supported.
That's insane! Why the hell would they do that? You'd expect them to just allow you to buy a key and activate the damn thing.
You’re not supposed to run a trial version anyway. You should have installed it with the right key and media straight away and trial as per the agreement.
Not sure that this works but easy enough to try.
https://winaero.com/blog/upgrade-windows-10-evaluation-to-full-version-easily/
Thanks to @FHR, this is the first thing I found online.
I was starting off with Enterprise 2016 LTSB Evaluation, not just Enterprise Evaluation, so the steps are not quite the same. But with a few minor modifications, this method did indeed work!
So problem solved.