[This article deals with issues with installing the 2012 GUI from Server Core. Do you need help with activating your license key? If so, try this article instead. ] Update: James Stephan, currently Senior Analyst with Dell Health Services, was kind enough to point out to me that I had neglected to mention this procedure will only function with fully licensed versions of Windows Server 2012. If you have downloaded and installed the free edition of Windows 2012 Server Core, you cannot activate the GUI. For quite a bit of detailed information specific to the free edition of 2012 Server Core, follow this link to James' blog . So I just started playing with Server 2012. Right out of the gate, I encountered issues on installing to a hard drive with a pre-existing Windows 7 installation. I nuked the partitions during the install, however when trying to install the full server GUI, I got a "Windows component cannot be found" error. I believe this was the result of the instal