Upgraded hardware from a PC without an online account linked. Impossible to activate the fresh Windows install?

[Windows Server]

My copy of Windows was originally purchased as Win7 Ultimate, then upgraded to Win10, and then upgraded to Win11.At no point did I link the install to a Microsoft account (just had a local account on the machine).I recently swapped my motherboard, CPU, and RAM, and performed a fresh Win11 install from a newly made install media.Now I can't activate Windows because the activation dialog won't accept the legacy Win7 product key. And since the previous install wasn't linked to my MS account, I also can't recover the digital key with the 'I recently changed hardware' option.Customer service hasn't

Continue reading...