Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Perpetual License Product Keys may give an error stating "The specified product key could not be validated. Check that the specified product key is valid and that it matches the target edition." When trying to convert an EVAL installation of an operating system to a fully licensed copy using CSP Product Key.
Hello this is Jason with Dell Technologies. Today we're going to discuss what to do to convert an eval install if you have Cloud Solution Provider, or CSP product keys and the CSP product keys do not work themselves to convert an eval operating system install.
It is best to use the ISO that is downloaded from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, so in the same area where you access your CSP product keys there'll be a link to download an ISO in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and if you do OS installs with that ISO you don't have to do any conversion and your Cloud Solution Provider product key will work to activate installs done with those isos.
But if you've already installed the operating system with an eval ISO you may notice that if you enter your CSP product key you'll get ‘The product key you entered didn't work. Check the product key again, or try again, or enter a different one.’ and you also get an error if you try to run the ‘dism’ command in Powershell to convert it. It will just give an error you can't use the CSP product key to convert.
So what we can do temporarily is a KMS key, which there's a link here to it or if you just search on Google or Bing it'll be the first result, and we have a whole list of product keys for all the different operating systems. So here I have Server 2022 Standard installed so we'll be using this product key to convert from eval. All we need to do is run PowerShell as administrator, you can see here, and I've already got the command entered here, just hit enter and it will run and it'll remove the evaluation package.
It only takes a minute or so, maybe even less. There we go, and now it's prompting for a reboot. So we'll need to reboot to finish removing the evaluation package. Now that the server is rebooted we can right click on the start menu and go to ‘System’ and when we scroll down you can see that says ‘Windows Server 2020 Standard’ and the evaluation version has been removed. Next we can refer to the article, and we'll want to remove the product key that we use, the KMS key.
We'll go to Windows Powershell admin again and type ‘slmgr /upk’ and that uninstalled the product key successfully. Now we'll want to run ‘slmgr /ipk’ and the space in between those and then enter your CSP product key. I'm just using the KMS key again, just as an example, and it should say ‘Installed product key’.
Then we'll run ‘slmgr /ato’, hit enter, and I'm not going to do that because I don't have a valid CSP key, but when you run that it'll activate it and it should say ‘Activated successfully’ and then you are good to go. So I hope this helped you, and thanks for watching. Have a good day.
