Will I have to Repurchase my windows 10 license if I upgrade my boot drive?

[mohamedashraf300]

I'm planning to replace my current SATA boot drive with a NVMe PCIe boot drive later down the line, will I have to repurchase windows 10?

 

[BFG-9000]

The only single devices you can change that will disable activation are the motherboard and NIC, so you can change drives and video cards as often as you like without affecting it.

If you do ever want to change something big like the motherboard, be sure to link your Windows installation to a Microsoft/Hotmail account first, because that even allows you to transfer the activation over to a new computer.

 

[coozie7]

No, but you will need to do a full reinstall of Widows to the new drive, there's no way to migrate the current install to it, and you'll have to reinstall ALL the current software, so be sure to back up your data, game saves, internet favourites etc before doing the upgrade.
Hint, before you start, download and save the latest drivers for the system to a USB stick before starting, that way it'll all be available to install once Windows has done its stuff.

 

[Colif]

You don't have to buy new licence, you can replace entire PC and win 10 will reactivate if you do certain steps 1st. You don't need to worry about that for simply replacing hdd. Your licence isn't tied to the hdd, it never was that way as hdd are one of most likely parts to need to be replaced.

Technically, you could clone contents of old hdd onto nvme drive, if the nvme drive is bigger than current boot drive. Its just better to start from scratch on a faster drive

download the Windows 10 media creation tool and use it to make a win 10 installer on USB

Win 10 pretty good at identifying hardware and installing drivers itself. You can download drivers 1st but whether you need to depends on age of PC. Older it is, more likely Windows has drivers already,