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Thursday, April 16, 2015

Attempting to activate an Active Directory-Based Activation throws the error: “Access is denied.”

Problem

You attempt to activate a new Windows Server 2012 R2 KMS server as an Active Directory-Based Activation:

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… but receive the following error:

The following error has occurred. Please resolve the error and try again.

Description:

Access is denied.

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Solution

The reason this error is presented is because the KMS server is not a domain controller.  The following TechNet article describes the requirements for setting up an an Active Directory-Based Activation KMS server:

Activate using Active Directory-based activation
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn613828.aspx

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5 comments:

Unknown said...

I had the same problem and the resolution for me was running Volume Activation Tools with elevated privileges by right clicking the icon and selecting, run as administrator.

Until I did this I continually got an access denied error but after that it worked fine.

Anonymous said...

Hello,

I use the following command in an elevated cmd.exe:
cscript slmgr.vbs /ad-activation-online XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX "WindowsServer2016Datacenter"

Best Regards
R.

David Ray said...

Thank you Chris Magnuson. That was my problem... could not figure it out... I had Enterprise Admins and could not understand 'Access Denied'. Never thought of such a basic thing (never mentioned in the MS docs either).

--David

Alan said...

Thank you as well Chris Magnuson. That did the trick!

Alan

Anonymous said...

I had to edit the dcom permissions. I had to add domain\administrators permissions to DCOM.

run: dcomcnfg
Component Servers -> Computers -> Right click on "My Computer" and click properties
Click on Com Security tab
Click on both Edit Default buttons and add domain\administrators and check mark all permissions.