XP Activation: Have Product Key but not original disc..

Basq

OK, here's the story..

My brother rang me on Friday morning saying his PC has an 'Unmountable Boot Volume' BSOD on startup which says to me the hard drive's screwed (same thing happened girlfriend's PC not too long ago, and it was also a Maxtor drive, bit shoddy?)

Anyways.. beside the point, Went up to PC World and bought a new 160GB Samsung bad-boy for €80 (80GB version of the same model next to it was €120.. ).

Anyways, he lost his XP installation disc when moving house recently. Has practically every other disc besides it but of course, it'd always be obvious to lost the most important disc but thank God we saved the Clipart disc! Phew!

So i said i'd use my own XP re-installation disc and we'd use the XP Product Key still on the side of his Packard Bell PC. Anyways, to cut an even longer story short.. it won't accept his product key and we have 28 days to activate it. So i presume it already knows that key have been activated or that it's bound to a machine.

Anything we can do in this instance? I mean Microsoft would "probably" understand if we rang them but don't wanna go re-installing the OS again considering we've already installed a lot of his programs / anti-virus etc on it.

So, any (legitimiate) way to solve this?

Thanks in advance.

SouperComputer

just call MS. Its not a big deal. In SP2 a list of major OEM's COA's were added so that you had to call the centre to actvate.

They may ask if this copy is on another machine, the answer is no (its really the COA that is important)

If they ask for they key, give it to them.

Basically, its not of consequence that you used your disk as long as you used the COA on the Packard Bell.

Basq

Cheers Souper. Will give that a go so.

astrofool

There's a program out there made by MS for activating different version product keys (i.e. OEM on retail and visa versa), a quick google may find it, KeyUpdateTool.exe and it's 664kb

astrofool

I've attached it to this post.

I've zipped it, and then renamed it to .txt (whoever on boards.ie thought it would be a good idea to have different max file sizes for different files types is an imbecile),

Just rename the file to .zip and extraxt it.

Should work, enjoy.

Basq

Cheers astro.. i presume it's legit if it's made by MS?

Ahhhhhhh... found the link here!

Many thanks!

kaizersoze

"May not" be the HD. Boot to recovery console and run chkdsk /r first.

Basq

kaizersoze wrote:

"May not" be the HD. Boot to recovery console and run chkdsk /r first.

Yeah, have got his HD beside me. I've been intending to check it at some point this weekend so probably will later.

Basq

The product key utility didn't work.. tried entering the key on his COA and still saying it's invalid!

Any other suggestions?

challengemaster

phone microsoft?

Redisle

just ring the microsft ireland activation number... i did this before for a friend... reinstalled xp on a packard bell using my own oem disc and it wouldnt activate so i rang microsoft, told them i reinstaled an oem xp... they asked me what kinda pc was it,where had i bought it,is it installed on any other machines etc etc and when i got all the answers right they gave me the activation number..

Simple as that.. and they are still open now.. i once rang them at 11pm on a sunday night

Sparky

OEM install keys cannot be activated over the net anymore and require you to call a rep.

You HAVE to do this.

In order to reduce a significant source of piracy, Microsoft has disabled online activation for COA Keys that are attached to PCs that have been pre-activated by OEMs. This change should have a minimal impact on licensed users who generally do not use their COA Key to activate the software because it has been pre-activated by the OEM. However, if a licensed end user needs to activate because the OEM pre-activation does not work as expected (e.g., after the replacement of a defective motherboard) they can do so via phone-based activation.

Or you could try this:
Read first
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/899356/en-us

Then:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/oempreac.mspx

rogue-entity

First, kaizer is right, you just needed to run chkdsk c: /r which will repair the file system on drive C, the boot volume. A friend of mine installed an update for Battlefield 2 and this was the result. 40 mins later after running this, his system was just fine.

Second, OEMs like Packard Bell use OEM versions of the windows software and stick the OEM product key on the side of the machine (the CoA). You must have used a non-OEM installation CD when you installed windows on that machine and that is why the system reports the product key as invalid. If you call MS Activation and give the CoA product key, it wont match the one used at the installation time.

Your best bet is to try and recover the hard disc, failing that, contact Packard Bell and ask them for a new recovery disc, chances are they dont supply full windows CDs anyway and instead will send you a set of discs that you use to restore the computer to its previous state. That said, I never had much luck with PB's recovery software.

Basq

Cheers for that rogue.

I didn't use the "/r" switch on chkdsk last night.. but i got nothing but unreadable sectors when it scanned the disk on startup. Surely "chkdsk /r" wouldn't repair this.

Regarding the OEM issue, i already installed XP using my Professional disk on a machine which came pre-installed with Microsoft Home.. so i'm already having my doubts. But not really willing to spend the guts of 2 hours installing XP, and then the essential (and not so essential) applications required for the day to day running of a machine which the brother would never have thought of (AVG, Ad-aware, Spybot etc.).

Think he's ringing Microsoft regarding the key in the next day or two so will let you know what they say. I'd much rather keep the XP i installed recently running rather than the copy on the shagged hard drive - which is probably riddled with every type of spyware, viruses and other nasty crap under the sun.

Matthewthebig

I had the same UMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME problem.

chkdsk /r fixed it right up.

Try the -r.

daywalker

basquille wrote:

Regarding the OEM issue, i already installed XP using my Professional disk on a machine which came pre-installed with Microsoft Home.. so i'm already having my doubts. But not really willing to spend the guts of 2 hours installing XP, and then the essential (and not so essential) applications required for the day to day running of a machine which the brother would never have thought of (AVG, Ad-aware, Spybot etc.).

The key provided on the machine would be for XP home, it would not provide you with a license for XP pro as well, if you installed XP pro on his machine rather than home, the phone activation or M$ rep wont license it. you'll need to install the same version of xp it came with for the activation to work.

astrofool

You either need to buy a valid XP Pro cd, or reinstall XP Home on the system, or fix the old disk.

Them's your options

SouperComputer

Once you have used an XP Home disk, and it installed OK, all you have to do is call M$ to activate it.

The keys for XP home and Pro are different and not interchangeble. IE you cannot even begin the installtion, nevermind activate afterwards.

Like sparky-s has posted, its actually noting to do with using your own XP Disc as such, but to do with updates with SP2 regarding activation.

It's legit, you just need to call M$, no big deal

Basq

Cheers all.. actually just checked the pocket of my jacket (which it's still in) the disc i used was XP Home!

My desktop in the house uses Pro whereas my laptop uses Home.. must have grabbed the laptop's disc when i left the house to fix his PC.

Will get onto the brother about calling MS.. but knowing him, he'll probably wait til the last minute!

Basq

Just an update on this.. brother rang Microsoft one day last week to activate it.

Said he didn't even need to speak to a rep.. simply entered a couple of details via the phone keypad (what details exactly i have no idea) and the activation code they gave him worked.

rogue-entity

Interesting, I assume your brothers PC had a copy of XP Pro that you installed using an XP Pro CD you either bought, or which came with your computer.
If it came with your computer, your brother is now using your XP licence and it will be forever tied to his machine which means if you ever reinstall Pro on your computer, and use the serial that is on the side of your machine, MS wont activate it for you.
If it was a retail CD you bought, then it seems to be happily working on both machines although it is technically illegal if the same key was used to activate more then one copy, MS dont seem to have noticed.

You can still recover the contents of that hard disc, if there was anything important on it.