I accidentally deactivated W10, now what.....

[Compman55]

I have 3 Dell Latitude E6510's I just aquired and needed to test. Being I own this same model as my spare laptop, I took the hard drive out, and popped it into one of the newly aquired laptops, it booted perfect, all hardware is the same except it has a high def LCD instead of the entry level LCD, and it deactived. This is nothing new, and I knew it would do this, as the bios key / hardware signature is not the same.

However my problem is, that after testing this newly aquired latop, I placed the original hard drive back into its original laptop (that was activated) and now cannot get it to activate at all.

Error code 0xD0000272

I called the automated support and it was unable to validate.

I have done this hundreds of times with windows 95 all the way up to windows 7 without issue.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Unless someone thinks of a way to rectify this from the laptop through some sort of clone you made before you removed the HDD and then returned it, this may be an indication to any of us as to how MS has further restricted their OEM Win10 OS over earlier versions.

I've been making final adjustments and hardware-choices for my new (sig) Skylake system. To be honest, I can't be entirely sure, but I think when I replaced my ADATA SSD with an NVMe M.2 Sammy 960, I had to reactivate through automated telephone and copy down the long string of numbers.

The system is a dual-boot with win-7 and win10 selectable from thel boot-menu. That may explain why my memory about it isn't so clear. But it was this machine, and I remember that it happened.

If you were going to test the other machines using the personal laptop's drive, you might have disconnected the Ethernet cable or disabled any wireless internet connection.

Windows 10 does a lot of things in the background for which Win 7 gave users more control. I mentioned elsewhere that it will defrag unlettered disk volumes you don't want it to access, until you customize the settings. Win 7 only gave you a defrag choice over lettered volumes. Win 10 will download hardware drivers you didn't want, and never tell you about it.

 

[Dahak]

Based on some quick searching, it seems that it cannot communicate with the activation server
So check internet connectivity, if there is any firewall turn it off temporarily, pull the key from on of the other good laptops. From the factory they usually ship with the same key that is used to activate during their build process (at least it was for 7, havent look into 10)

Worse case, you may need to do a factory restore

 

[Compman55]

WTF?????????????????

I put the original hard drive in its original laptop and it would not activate. Now magic happened, I put it back into the spare laptop and it activated in 10 minutes. This makes no sense at all. Its not even the same machine it was installed on originally.

 

[JackMDS]

When you do such move with Retail version there No problems.

It will adapt to any computer that was already Activated with the same version of Win 10.

With OEM, you never know because of the BIOS signature involvement.

What to learn? Instead of cursing, Next time clone the original and use the cloned drive rather than transfer the actual drive from one computer to the other.