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Massgrave and Windows LTSC / IoT: The Long-Life Editions

LTSC and IoT LTSC are the editions people run when they want a machine to stay unchanged for a decade. Activation behaves slightly differently on them.

Why LTSC is different

Enterprise LTSC and IoT Enterprise LTSC ship with a ten-year servicing lifecycle, no Store, no bundled apps and no feature updates. They are volume-licensed SKUs, which changes which activation paths apply.

The practical consequence: the digital-license service that HWID relies on is inconsistent about LTSC SKUs. Sometimes it accepts them, sometimes it reports the edition as unsupported.

The method order for LTSC

  1. Try HWID first. If it succeeds, you get a permanent server-side license that survives reinstalls. Best possible outcome.
  2. KMS38 if HWID refuses. Fully offline, expiry set to January 2038 — for an LTSC box that is effectively permanent given the servicing window.
  3. TSforge if both are awkward. Writes licensing data directly, edition-agnostic, offline, permanent.

All three are in the same MAS menu; you can try them in order without uninstalling anything in between.

IoT Enterprise LTSC specifics

IoT Enterprise LTSC is the edition of choice for kiosks, embedded devices and minimal desktops. It responds well to KMS38 and TSforge. HWID support is the least reliable of the LTSC family — do not spend time forcing it, move to KMS38.

Windows Server

Server 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2025 activate with KMS38 or TSforge. HWID does not apply to Server at all — there is no consumer digital-license path. For a domain controller or a hypervisor host, TSforge is usually preferable because it leaves no scheduled task.

Verifying on a long-life box

slmgr /xpr
slmgr /dli

A 2038 expiry confirms KMS38. "Permanently activated" confirms HWID or TSforge. On a machine you will not touch for years, note in your own records which method you used — the remediation differs if it ever lapses.

What breaks it later

LTSC does not receive feature updates, which is exactly why activation tends to stay put. The realistic risks are hardware changes (a motherboard swap invalidates an HWID binding) and disk imaging across different hardware. Both are fixed by a single re-run.

Getting LTSC media

Use official Microsoft ISOs. LTSC ISOs circulating on file-sharing sites are a far bigger security risk than any activation method — a modified install image compromises the machine before you ever open a terminal.

Get the script

Open Terminal (Admin) or PowerShell (Admin) and run:

irm https://get.activated.win | iex

Prefer offline? Grab the archive from the download page and run MAS_AIO.cmd as administrator. More help: MAS script overview · Massgrave Windows guide · troubleshooting · error decoder.

Get MAS from the official project

This site does not host its own build of the scripts. The buttons below go to the project’s own repository and mirrors, so what you get is what the developers published.

Download from official repositoryView official releasesView source

PowerShell one-liner published by the project:

irm get.activated.win | iex

Check the domain before running it, and see how to verify what you run.

Activation tooling is routinely classified as riskware by antivirus software. That is expected for this category and is not by itself evidence of malware — nor proof that a particular copy is clean. Verify the source before running anything.