After installing a new licence, they identify as the expected channel. After some time, they identified as “RETAIL” channel. When initially installed the volume licence editions of windows self-identified as “VOLUME_MAK” channel. However, I also need to sort out the problem! Regardless, I hope to replace all 6 licences. We have since purchased 5 and installed 4 genuine Windows 10 Pro Licences over the volume licences ( slmgr /ipk xxxxxxx slmgr /ato), but although it has eased my conscience somewhat, it has made no difference to the update problem we have. I did try removing the product key ( slmgr /upk), and rearming ( slmgr /rearm) and then installing the updates while in the state of “waiting for activation” but when Windows restarted to do the install it must have somehow reinstalled the product key and reactivated itself because it was activated when it had finished booting and gave exactly the same error. These are OEM copies of Windows 10 Pro that came with the computers they are installed on. They give error codes 0x8007007b and 0x80240017, indicating that they were looking for a KMS (key management server). Then 6 different Windows 10 Pro computers that we have failed to update.

We discovered this after purchasing 6 of them and installing them. However, the ones we found, although not advertised as volume licences, were actually volume licences. When we did this, we looked hard for the cheapest copies we could find without buying volume licences. Recently we had to purchase 6 copies of Windows 10 Pro to update some Windows 7 computers to comply with Cyber Essentials.

Error code 0x8007007b windows 10