Reinstall Windows and keep your licence intact

There is nothing to restore, because your digital licence was never on the PC.

You are about to wipe a machine that still works, and the one thing holding you back is the licence. By the end of this page you will know which of the four reinstall routes fits your situation, what each one deletes, and why the phrase "restore my Windows licence" describes something that does not really exist.

Start with where a digital licence actually lives. It is not a file on your drive. It is not a registry entry a backup tool can save for you. Microsoft ties the licence to your device's hardware and keeps the record on its own activation servers. Format the disk and you delete Windows. The record does not move.

Which is why there is no export button, no licence backup and no folder worth copying to a USB stick before you begin. When the fresh installation reaches the internet, it presents the same hardware fingerprint, finds the same record and activates itself. Usually within a few minutes. Occasionally it takes a restart, and the people who panic in that window are the ones who end up making things worse.

Read your activation screen carefully before you erase anything.

Twenty seconds, and hardly anybody spends them. Open Settings > System > Activation. On Windows 10 the same page sits under Settings > Update & Security > Activation.

Two sentences matter more than anything else you will read today:

• "Windows is activated with a digital license": the licence is tied to your hardware, and no Microsoft account is attached to it.
• "Windows is activated with a digital license linked to your Microsoft account": the same licence, plus a route back if the hardware ever changes.

Note the edition on that page as well. Home or Pro, written down somewhere you will still have after the reinstall. That single word causes more failed activations than any other detail in this whole topic, because setup will happily install the wrong one if you let it.

Then photograph the screen with your phone. It is an inelegant habit and it has rescued more evenings than any tool I can name. And if the page tells you Windows is not activated, stop right there. Reinstalling does not repair an activation that was already broken. It only removes the state in which you could still work out why.

There are four ways to reinstall, and they differ only in what survives.

Windows does not have one reinstall. It has four, and the activation survives all of them. Your programs do not.

Microsoft describes the second row plainly: "It removes apps and settings but preserves your documents, photos, and other personal data." The third is blunter still, since that option "reinstalls Windows and removes all your personal files, apps, and settings".

Read the second row twice. Keeping your files is not the same as keeping the software that opens them. A reset leaves a list of removed apps on your desktop, which is a list and not a backup. Everything on it comes back by hand, with its own sign-in and its own licence.

A clean install of Windows 11 needs no product key at all.

Partway through a clean install, setup asks for a key. You do not need one. Select "I don't have a product key" and carry on. After installation Windows activates against the digital licence that is attached to the machine anyway.

The step immediately after that one is where people quietly lose the afternoon: choose the same edition you noted earlier. Install Home on a device carrying a Pro licence and Windows will finish, look perfectly normal and refuse to activate. The message you get will say nothing about editions.

Hunting for the key itself is usually wasted effort, because with a digital licence there is no key you are meant to type. If you want to read it out regardless, perhaps to document a retail purchase you paid for, the methods are set out in our guide on how to find your Windows product key and where your licence key lives.

slmgr /xpr

Run that in an elevated Command Prompt and Windows answers in one line whether the installation is permanently activated. Faster than any settings page when you just want certainty.

Cloud download and local reinstall do not give you the same Windows.

Both live behind the same button. Go to Settings > System > Recovery and choose Reset PC; on Windows 10 it is Settings > Update & Security > Recovery. After Windows asks whether to keep your files, it asks where the new copy should come from, and that second question gets clicked past far too quickly.

• Cloud download "downloads a fresh copy of Windows from the cloud, ensuring you get the latest version with all updates".
• Local reinstall "uses the files already on your PC to reinstall Windows". Microsoft calls it faster on a slow connection, but says it may not include the latest updates.

Take the cloud download unless you are on a metered or genuinely slow connection. The logic is short: if you are resetting because something is broken, a local reinstall rebuilds Windows from the very files that might be the problem. Expect several gigabytes and keep the laptop on mains power. Both options are described on Microsoft's page about resetting your PC, checked on 8 August 2026.

Keeping your installed programs works on exactly one route.

It is not the reset. It is an in-place installation started from inside the running system, hidden behind an ordinary setup file rather than a button in Settings, which is why so few people find it.

1. Download the installation media for your version of Windows and mount the ISO file by double-clicking it.
2. Open setup.exe in the root directory of that drive and select Yes when asked whether the app may make changes to your device.
3. Choose "Keep personal files and apps", which preserves your personal data, apps and settings.
4. Let it run. It restarts several times and will sit on one percentage for a long stretch. Do not interrupt it, however dead it looks.

The other two choices on that screen are "Keep personal files only", which preserves your data and settings but removes all your apps, and "Keep nothing", which removes personal data, settings and apps together.

Two conditions apply. Windows still has to boot, and you install the same edition and the same language as the one already there. If the machine no longer starts, this route is off the table and you are back to one of the other rows.

An opinion that will not be popular: when you are reinstalling because the system misbehaves, keeping your apps is often the wrong choice. You carry the cause across with everything else. I have watched the same machine get repaired this way twice and come back a third time with an identical error, at which point the clean install took forty minutes and settled it permanently.

Losing a licence and having to reactivate are two different problems.

Most guides run these together, and that is where the fear comes from. A reinstall does not take your licence away. What can happen is narrower: Windows fails to find the record that matches the machine and asks you to activate again. Your entitlement is intact. The automatic match is what broke.

Microsoft is precise about when that happens. The digital licence "associates itself with your device's hardware", and if you make significant hardware changes "such as replacing your motherboard, Windows will no longer find a license that matches your device". That is the one change that genuinely severs the connection.

What does not sever it is worth stating just as clearly, because the fear of it delays a lot of perfectly safe reinstalls. A new SSD, extra memory, a different graphics card, a replacement power supply: none of these normally disturb activation. If you have already swapped a motherboard, the recovery procedure is covered in our article on restoring your Windows licence after a hardware change rather than here.

There is a third case that is neither of those, and it catches people buying second-hand. If the machine never carried a valid licence to begin with, no reinstall will conjure one up. In that situation a licence of your own, entered under Change product key, is the only honest fix, and a Windows 11 Pro licence does exactly that job.

What can be restored is the match, not the licence itself.

So what do people mean when they search for a way to restore a Windows 11 licence? Almost always one of three things, and only one of them is real.

The real one is the activation troubleshooter. It sits at Settings > System > Activation > Troubleshoot and its job is to re-establish the link between your Microsoft account and a device Windows no longer recognises. Two conditions come with it. Microsoft states that "the troubleshooter will only be available if your copy of Windows 11 isn't activated", so if Windows is activated the option is simply not there, and that is correct behaviour rather than a fault. It also only works through an account you linked beforehand.

That prerequisite is the part worth acting on today. Microsoft puts it in unusually firm language: "In Windows 11, it is essential that you link your Microsoft account with the Windows 11 digital license on your device." The link is made under Settings > System > Activation with Add an account, it takes about a minute, and the full walkthrough is in our piece on linking your Windows digital licence to your Microsoft account.

The two unreal ones are worth naming as well. There is no key to recover on a device that only ever had a digital licence, so a key-finder tool gives you a generic string that activates nothing. And a licence that shipped with a manufacturer's machine belongs to that machine, so no procedure lifts it onto different hardware.

Still not activated? These are the causes that usually turn out to apply.

Windows says very little when activation fails. Six explanations cover most of it:

• The wrong edition is installed. Home on a Pro licence, or the reverse. Check the edition shown on the activation page against the one you noted before you started.
• The machine has not been online yet. No connection means no check against the activation servers. On an install done entirely offline, this is the default explanation.
• You looked too soon. Give it half an hour and a restart before you start changing anything.
• The USB stick is not offered at boot. Try a different port, ideally USB-A, and rebuild the stick with Microsoft's tool instead of copying files onto it. Microsoft points you to your PC manufacturer for changing the boot order.
• Setup stalls at the same percentage. Disconnect external drives, card readers and docking stations, then try again. Peripherals cause more of these than anyone expects.
• The licence was a manufacturer licence on replaced hardware. It stays with the device it shipped on and does not follow you to a new board.

If none of that lands, email us with the exact sentence shown under Activation and the edition you installed. Those two details are normally enough to settle it in one reply.

One pattern holds up year after year: almost nobody gets stuck on the installation. People get stuck on what they forgot to take with them. The hour spent listing programs, licence codes and sign-ins beforehand matters more than which route you eventually pick, which is why most guides start counting steps at the wrong moment.