How to get and use the Windows key from UEFI/BIOS
I found
myself in the situation that I needed to get the Windows key out from the ACPI
in the UEFI bios and preferable get to use it in a task sequence in MDT.
There are
different ways of doing this, but I wanted to do this with little code and easy
to understand.
There is a
nice tool created to get the key on github, created by Christian Korneck,
called get_win81key. This tool gives you the key in plane text. You can get it
If I were
supposed to do this manually, I now would just take that key and type it in
with slmgr command or in the GUI. But I want to do this within a task in MDT.
Testing a
couple of solutions without using the get_win8key with my great scripting guru
colleague Håvard ( www.grondal.me) and figuring out that it cannot be done with
default powershell stuff, it needs more code. Therefore, we quickly figured out
that some use of the “get_win8key” files is the easiest way, but we need a way
of setting the output from the file into a variable that we can use with the
slmgr command.
Testing out
some different solutions we ended up in this nice little line:
for /F
"delims=" %%a in ('%~dp0get_win8key.exe') do set key=%%a
The
get_win8key.exe files need to be located in the same folder as the cmd files
that we want to run the script. We now have a variable with the result from the
get_win8key
Next thing
is that we want to insert that key into Windows with the “slmgr” and active it.
We also want this to be done quiet. The quiet part are done with the parameter
//B in cscript. We then need 2 lines of slmgr :
cscript //B
%windir%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk %key%
cscript //B
%windir%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato
Pasting the code together it will look like
this:
The next
step is to copy both the get_win8key.exe and a cmd file with the script into
the script folder at out MDT deployment share. I have simply called the script
file “Get-Winkey.cmd”
I then need
to modify the task sequence that I use to install Windows Pro (Remember that
you need to have a BIOS with the key for this to work, and if you are deploying
anything else then a version matching the version of the key in BIOS it will
fail. Try doing it manually if you are unsure)
