Is it possible to install Windows on a hard drive on one computer, then activate it on another?

Solution 1:

Windows is in fact tied to hardware, so if you are asking if you can install Windows 10 on one computer, pull the drive and have it be seen as a licensed copy on the other machine, the basic answer is "no." (You can change the license to a valid one at this point though.)

If, however, you are asking "can I install to a drive, move that drive to another machine, and then activate/license windows 10 on the new hardware" then the answer is "yes."

You can add a clean drive as a secondary drive; mount an ISO/image of windows-10 setup disc along with the dism tool (and diskpart etc) to setup an "out of box experience" Windows 10 install on that secondary drive; make it bootable; then drop it into a new computer. You can then add a valid retail license after/during the OOBE first boot.

You can then image the drive itself and use that as a snapshot image to revert to a vanilla system.

The dism part looks something like this:

--mount the ISO file with drive letter {ISO}
-- {NEW_OS} refers to drive letter of the secondary drive we are installing windows to.

--find appropriate OS image index on the ISO. This will be the OS version you want ( {INDEX#} ) :
dism /Get-ImageInfo /ImageFile:{ISO}:\sources\install.wim

--identify desired index and use for the following command (installs the OS to new disk):
dism /Apply-Image /ImageFile:{ISO}:\sources\install.wim /Index:{INDEX#} /ApplyDir:{NEW_OS}:\

Note the index is the license level that matches your license (e.g. home/pro) so you need to query that. The partitioning and bootable part varies (i.e GPT or not GPT).

There are many walk-throughs of this process, and the diskpart commands are "dangerous enough" for me to not ad-lib. Maybe search for "dism install windows-10 apply-image".