massgrave.dev

So some fun facts:

• If you buy enough licenses from Microsoft, instead of giving you a bunch of unique licence keys to keep track of, they will give you a license that you can install on a server, and a special “volume license key” that you use on every machine - then, instead of talking to Microsoft to activate themselves, they connect to your server which ensures that it is only activating as many machines as you have licenses for
• These volume license keys are public knowledge to the point that Microsoft publish them on their site because they are useless unless you have a server to validate the activations
• The server protocol is not complex, has been reverse engineered, and there are open source server implementations that forget the whole “ensure you have the right number of licenses” part

Just in case it doesn’t carry over, run this first to get your Windows Pro key: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

If you’re replacing, why not clone the old drive to the new and expand to fill?

The system should activate itself if you only replace the disk.

But… if you ever need a license use one of the activation scripts from massgravel on githu… I mean buy a new license on microsoft.com and enjoy your shiny, legally activated operaring system.

…or just install Linux, if your use case allows you to do so