I recently found out that these keys are nowadays embedded in the BIOS. The following command will retrieve it:
sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
This works even if you nuked Windows and installed Linux. Do note that this key will be locked to that particular hardware; you could reinstall Win on that specific computer, but you can’t use that key to activate Win on a different machine.
So I did this. I nuked Windows when I bought a new laptop. About a year later I changed jobs and now needed to use Visual Studio. Now I know why Windows never hassled me for a key when I reinstalled…
Don’t do this. Either run unactivated or do it officially.
Better option is to run a Linux VM with Wine. As it turns out, Microsoft is very happy to let you pirate Windows because they want your data and to sell you One drive.
I run Linux with wine and if I make a Windows VM I’ll still use MAS and other tools to strip out Microsofts bloatwear. If you don’t like OneDrive so much then why even bother paying Microsoft for the trash heap that is Windows? There’s more than just OneDrive stealing your data.
If Microsoft really cared they’d pull a Nintendo and have GitHub nuke their repo.
They want you to use Windows as they aren’t dumb. They see competitors like Linux gaining popularity in the tech desktop space and they want to make it easy for tech savvy users to use Windows.
OK I’m a little shocked here, how does this work? Back in the day when licenses were harder to come by, we used to use cracks / activators that would patch some binary or exploit some bug to activate. Is this … an open source version of that?
I believe it works by obtaining a real licence from Microsoft servers. Since MS wants to get everybody to move from 7 to 10/11 the only thing required to upgrade a win 7 install to 10 or 11 is an installation ID. And you can reuse the same installation ID infinitely.
I’m not sure exactly how it works. I haven’t used it in a while now. It has several different options to activate, including hardware id or setting up a local KMS server. I only ever had to use it one time, per windows install, and it would keep windows activated. It also has a tool to switch windows versions, i.e. home to pro. It is fully open source and their wiki goes into more detail. massgrave.dev
Add comment