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Norton Ghost and WinXP Activation

  • 13-02-2007 10:41AM
    #1
    DoesNotCompute
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,375 ✭✭✭


    Hi, I'm not sure if this is the correct place to put this thread, but wth...


    Recently my primary HDD with win xp home edition installed on it started giving me trouble. It's making weird noises and sounds like it's about to give in. SO I decided to get my hands on Norton Ghost, and used it to save an image of my primary drive to another SATA drive. The SATA drive has two partitions, one used for storage, and another that I'm trying to use to put the image of my primary HDD onto.

    So after I put the image of my primary HDD on the second partition of my SATA drive, I booted to said partition, and windows loaded OK. I logged in as administrator, and the mofo is now telling me that I must re-activate windows, giving me a Yes/No dialog box. No matter what I press ("Yes" or "No"), windows just kicks me out, leaving me looking at the login screen.

    I've already activated windows over a year ago, and it is a completely legit copy of windows which I shelled out good money for. I'm assuming windows is throwing a wobbly because the disk that it's running on now is signifigcantly different to the HDD that it was installed on originally.

    So any ideas how to get around this (legally)?


Comments

  • #2
    8T8
    Closed Accounts Posts: 4,757 ✭✭✭8T8


    Well I'm not totally sure but the activation request came about probably because some degree of hardware changed in the system over time but did not kick in the activation request till now as the disc image to a new HD basically put it over the line. You can read about how it works at this link.

    If you haven't changed the hardware well that is a perplexing one along with the inability to properly activate it, best thing to do is call Microsoft I would say.

    What you could try is boot into safe mode or use another machine to rename the WPA.DBL and WPA.BAK to something else (like WPA.2DBL), they are stored in the Windows\System32 that will force a reactivation (maybe their presence is what's throwing the activation wizard off).


  • #3
    DoesNotCompute
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,375 ✭✭✭DoesNotCompute


    8T8 wrote:
    Well I'm not totally sure but the activation request came about probably because some degree of hardware changed in the system over time but did not kick in the activation request till now as the disc image to a new HD basically put it over the line. You can read about how it works at this link.

    If you haven't changed the hardware well that is a perplexing one along with the inability to properly activate it, best thing to do is call Microsoft I would say.

    What you could try is boot into safe mode or use another machine to rename the WPA.DBL and WPA.BAK to something else (like WPA.2DBL), they are stored in the Windows\System32 that will force a reactivation (maybe their presence is what's throwing the activation wizard off).


    Cool, thanks for the info. Incidentally, I have indeed made incremental changes to the system over the last year, so you might be onto something there.


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