Thursday, August 16, 2012

Windows 8 RTM Activation Error - ‘DNS Name does not exist’

 

As Microsoft partners we have received the RTM build of Windows 8 Enterprise which I duly installed on my PC.

In the action centre I was prompted to activate Windows. I noticed that the key shown in the activation wizard did not end with the characters of the key given to us by Microsoft and when I clicked on ‘Activate’ I received an error stating ‘DNS Name does not exist’.

To resolve this issue I used the command line and entered the following command via an ‘elevated’ command prompt i.e. I right clicked and selected ‘Run As Administrator…’

slmgr.vbs -ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx

I then receive a prompt that the key had been changed and when I clicked on ‘Activate’ all was sorted.