I want to reinstall windows on my new SSD, concerned about windows license

[Krishna_Mouli]

My HP laptop is the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 cx0140tx. It came only with a 1TB HDD, now I wish to add in a 256gb nvme ssd for better performance. When I bought the laptop, it came in with a genuine version of windows 10 and MS-office 2016. Now that I have to format my HDD and reinstall windows on SSD, my main concern is will the reinstalled windows get activated. I've researched online, and found out 2 ways to do this, first is to use the windows media creation tool, which basically created a fresh bootable drive for windows, second is to use the inbuild windows feature which is to create a windows recovery drive. I'm not sure which method to use and the main important problem is the windows activation. How can i make sure that i won't run into any windows activation problems after formatting my HDD and reinstalling windows onto the SSD. In my accounts menu in windows settings it says, "Windows is activated through a digital license, and is connected to your MS account", but i don't see any definitive proof of this. When i go to my account page in microsoft.com all it says is that my PC is linked to this account, is that sufficient proof for my digital license being linked to this account??, also if anyone has a better method of doing this, please let me know, thanks in advance. 

[banhien]

@Krishna_Mouli 

Windows 10 license key is embedded in BIOS of your machine, also is on Microsoft record. Machine will activate itself automatically when you come online after the new installation

Regards.

[Krishna_Mouli]

Ohh thanks for the help and is there any way for me to make sure of that??, because once i format my HDD, there's no going back and i don't wanna lose my licensed version of windows. i am aware that the BIOS is stored on a different ROM chip on the motherboard, so do you mean to say that my windows license is also stored on that ROM chip and not on my HDD. Does the same logic apply to MS office as well?? and also, i plan on removing my HDD with windows and my files already on it and installing the SSD, installing windows on the SSD and if everything is fine with the SSD, then i'll install my HDD back and then i'll format it, instead of doing it post SSD installation, if something goes wrong i'll forget about the SSD and install only my HDD back. Would it be fine or will I run into any problems?

[banhien]

@Krishna_Mouli 

100% sure. If you wish, you can use the following tools to see what it is

• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/showkeyplus/9pkvzcprx9nv#activetab=pivot:overviewtab
• https://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/

Regards.

[Krishna_Mouli]

@Banhien Thanks a lot for your support, I finally installed a SSD, but I was still a bit concerned about the licence so I removed my HDD and installed only the SSD, but then I couldn't boot into my USB bootable drive, after a quick search I realised that, I have to enable legacy mode, which was turned off earlier, i turned on legacy mode which automatically turned off secure boot, now that i have properly installed SSD and everything is working fine, i want to reinstall my HDD and format it, can i just do that normally, as in, just install my HDD, boot into windows which is on SSD and go to disk management and format my HDD from there, is it possible?? and fyi i have absolutely done nothing to the HDD it's exactly the way it was before SSD installation which means my previous windows install and everything else is still on there, all the EFI partitions and everything, 

i have 3 questions here,

1)will legacy boot affect anything??

2) can i normally boot into my new SSD with legacy boot enabled and HDD installed and format my HDD from windows disk management?? 

3) after installing windows on my SSD i tried going back to BIOS to turn off legacy boot, but then it didn't let me boot into my SSD only turning it on lets me boot into SSD, am i stuck with legacy boot?? or is there any way to turn it off and switch back to UEFI secure boot?