Hey everyone this is my first time posting so pardon any formatting mismatches.
Ive recently created and installed a windows 11 pro ISO using win creator or whatever its called from the util and followed all the steps. It installed flawlessly with all the tweaks having taken effect and all. But i notice Windows is not activated, and in the page to activate it, it gives me an error code 0xC004C003. I was wondering if this is as far as the uitil goes? or is activation one of the tweaks? Ive done this once maybe a year and a half ago and dont remember windows needing activation.
Any input would be of great help, thank you!
Was the machine originally retailed with Windows Home installed, or any other version except Pro for that matter?
[SOLVED] :
After a bit of digging, i found this script at this repo to activate windows and it worked great!
Mind you please check the script before running (def what i did hahah…).
its since been solved but im wondering what are the implication here? because my machine was indeed shipped with windows 11 home.
Good to hear you’re up and away. Having fixed your own install, you’re probably already aware of why this happens so I won’t get into it here. It is the same with Rufus too, and that being the case I suspect it’s common among these installer creation utilities, They’re not at fault, but it would be cool if they pointed out the simple work-around.
Yeah I have not the slightest clue how these tools work, thus where it goes wrong in activation. Because it seems like you can add this script i ran to the end of (what i believe to be) a long list of commands to execute once the installation is finished. Or make it run at some point where the installation would already be activated. But yeah maybe this sounds simple but is much harder under the surface.
As I understand it, the installer builder, either WinUtil or Rufus and others, acquire which original version of Windows the OEM installed at the time of the computer’s manufacture from a firmware location (possibly bios). So when you or I run our newly created installer USB, it reads that location then offers the same version. Which is a bit of a pain if like you and I, we upgraded at some point. There’s a trick that I’ve tried with Rufus, whereby dropping a text file called ei.cfg into the sources folder on the USB stick you created containing the following
ini
[Channel]
Retail
[VL]
0
will force Rufus to offer a choice of WIndows version. If it’s a volume license key you bought, then change Retail to Volume.
That’s it, no scripts, just boot from the USB and Bob’s your uncle.