I have 10 identical PCs which I upgrade from Windows 7 to 10. I started this process with 2 PCs. I upgraded them individually from 7 to 10 and after Windows 10 started (connected to the internet) I checked that it is activated. It shows "Windows is activated with a digital license." As expected the two PCs have different product IDs.
After that I formatted the hard disk on one of them and installed Windows 10 from scratch without entering a product key. As expected it showed that it is activated because MS recognized the hardware and the digital license.
I used a local Windows account because I plan to add these PCs to a local domain.
I spend some time installing all the drivers, updates, applications, etc. which should be identical for all the PCs.
After that was done I cloned the hard disk from PC-A to PC-B to safe all the extra time on that PC.
The cloned PC-B works fine and it shows it's activated with a digital license. But surprisingly it shows on PC-A and the cloned PC-B exactly the same product-ID. I would have thought that the cloned PC-B would check with MS and retrieve the digital license which it had after the initial upgrade. But this did not happen, even after a couple of restarts with the internet connected all the time.
I want to do the upgrade (just basic to get the Windows 10 activation) and then the cloning for all 10 PCs. But I am concerned that if they will have all the same product ID maybe after some hours or days or weeks MS might complain that there can't be 10 PC with the same product-ID and all on the same network.
This is why I want to verify if all PCs are recognized to have a valid license.
There was a validate-procedure for Windows 7 some time ago. Maybe something similar exists for Windows 10.
Answer
It seems Windows verifies the activation automatically whenever it is connected to the internet. After cloning all 10 PCs about 7 of them showed that they are not activated. When this happened I selected in Settings Activation and then Troubleshoot. This option is only available if Windows shows it is not activated. When I clicked on Troubleshoot a new window opened "Detecting activation problems". After maybe half a minute the windows showed "We've activated this copy of Windows" and now all is ok on all PCs.
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