WIndows 10 Licensing - Random Errors

Matt Dillon 437 Reputation points
2021-01-05T15:15:24.877+00:00

I work in a shop that has Windows 10 Professional deployed. During SCCM Image deployment, the following script is run to get a Product Code for Windows Activation:

$ProductKey = (Get-WmiObject -Class SoftwareLicensingService).OA3xOriginalProductKey
iex "cscript /b C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs -ipk $Productkey" 
Start-Sleep 5
iex "cscript /b C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs -ato"

It has been working flawlessly.

In the past few days, the Help Desk is reporting that a small amount of systems are showing that the license is about to expire. The Activation screen shows “Windows is activated using your organization’s activation service” instead of “Windows is activated with a digital license”.

To resolve, I remote into the affected PC and rerun the script shown above.

What I am wondering is what could have caused these endpoints to suddenly want to use KMS licensing and why is this not happening to all the Windows 10 endpoints. Can anyone point me in the right direction to try and figure out what is happening?

Thank you.

Windows for business Windows Client for IT Pros User experience Other
0 comments No comments
{count} votes

3 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
  1. Anonymous
    2021-01-06T03:25:48.74+00:00

    Hi,
    Before going further, I would appreciate your help in clarifying the following situations:
    Were these PCs activated by OEM keys that are embedded in the BIOS/UEFI firmware?
    Were these PCs activated when the script were run manually?

    Might need to check licences status in these PCs using the following command in elevated command prompt:
    slmgr.vbs /dlv

    Best regards.

    **
    If the Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.
    Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

    0 comments No comments

  2. Matt Dillon 437 Reputation points
    2021-01-08T16:15:26.547+00:00

    Yes - a PowerShell scrip-t runs during the SCCM Task Sequence that activates the keys in BIOS/ UEFI firmware. The problem is fixed when I manually run the same script after the error occurs. My question is more of why is this happening?

    0 comments No comments

  3. Darrell Gorter 2,731 Reputation points
    2021-01-08T17:18:11.953+00:00

    Hello,
    On a machine that had the issue open an elevated CMD prompt, run licensingdiag.
    This collects the licensing events from the Event logs, search those to see if there are any indications of a change of product keys.
    Make the cab available if possible as well

    0 comments No comments

Your answer

Answers can be marked as Accepted Answers by the question author, which helps users to know the answer solved the author's problem.