Windows CD Key troubles

I got suckered into fixing a neighbor's computer. Turns out that their hard drive had gone bad. No problem, really. Just get them to get a new hard drive and reinstall Windows. I was able to use GetDataBack, and my refrigerator, to recover virtually everything off the bad drive, so restoring the data shouldn't be a big problem. I was even able to load the computer's registry as a hive to recover its CD Key. Which is where the problem comes in.

I've tried installing Windows a number of ways from a number of different install media, and I can't get it to accept the CD Key. The computer is a discard from her previous employer, so I have no idea how it was initially installed. Also, (I assume) she doesn't have a Windows install CD.

I ended up calling Microsoft licensing support and they told me that if I gave them the part number printed on the original CD, they would give me a new Key. But I don't have the original CD; if I did I (probably) wouldn't be having this problem to begin with.

As I was typing this post, it occurred to me to search Google for the CD Key, and I found that it's an OEM/SLP key, which apparently is a key used en masse by big computer integrators to simplify installation. (That is, apparently, your preinstalled Dell computer probably has the same CD Key as "every" other Dell computer.) And those keys won't activate in the normal manner.

So what do I do now? Sadly, there's no CD Key sticker on the computer itself. Half the stickers are worn off, so I don't know if it ever had one or not. But the key matches the manufacturer, IBM. I have no reason to believe that it's an illegal installation.

I think you need an IBM-specific XP install CD. I have got Dell CD keys to work with various generic XP OEM CDs before, one was a full-hologram style disc.

edit: I think a retail CD might work too, but it might ask to be activated, which should work ok.

Here's a suggestion. Don't know if it will work, but it may.

1. Use any other key you can get your hands on (I'll leave that up to you) to perform the install - this is only temporary, just to get you to the desktop.

2. Use a key changer tool to put the original CD key back into the registry, replacing the temporary one used above.

3. Activate.

Obviously you can force #3 with yet another tool if it doesn't work automatically/properly.

When I initially encountered the issue, that's where I went, and #3 is where I'm having the problem. I don't really want to hack it, because she had a legit copy before and I don't want to put her in that position.

A retail CD does not work. I didn't think to try an IBM OEM CD. I think I have one lying around work here somewhere.

I wonder whether you can modify one of your install CDs with an altered i386\setupp.ini so that it accepts the OEM preinstallation code you took from the registry? A bit of Googling on setupp.ini will get you some helpful hits, perhaps this is useful: http://wiki.lunarsoft.net/wiki/Product_IDs

I'm confused. If you have the original install media, why can't you use the CD key that came with that install? Are they all pirated?

(At first) He didn't have the install media required for the CD key recovered from the friend's computer.

I think he still doesn't have the original CD Key. Or maybe I'm confused as well. The original run-down has me a little confused.

Bitt, if I understand correctly, you have another XP CD, and you're trying to get the old CD key to work with this other install disc? Why not just use the new install disc and its own CD key?

I'd understand any hesitance you might have, but as a last resort you could just install Windows 7 RC on there. IMO it's ready for prime time, and that'll give you until next June to convince them to actually buy a computer

Yeah, that's what I meant.

You can't expect an OEM key to work for a Retail installer, or vice-versa.

I'm assuming the retail disks Bitt tried came with their own CD keys which are already in use and that Bitt would rather not have running on his friend's machine. Seeing as he's trying to stay within the spirit of the licensing agreement and all.

Bitt, did that IBM install CD work for you?

I had a similar problem with an IBM Thinkpad running XP Home. After reading around for solutions I installed a dodgy (warez) copy of XP Home to the laptop and failed the 'Geniune Windows' test on purpose. I then followed the instructions on the screen and entered the Windows Key on the bottom of the laptop into a box and voila - all activated and working.

This was a while ago, so I'm not totally clear on the details. I tried to find some better information but this page on WGA Failure Scenarios from Microsoft is the best I could find right now.

Okay, answering all these questions at once.

I have the computer, but not the original install CD.

I extracted the CD Key from the bad drive, but it turns out that it's IBM's non-unique preactivation key, which won't activate with the activation tool.

There is not a Windows sticker on the computer. Don't know why.

It wasn't until immediately before I initially posted that I realized that it was an OEM key. I could have sworn that OEM keys contained the string "OEM" in them.

I have a random variety of XP install CDs, specifically a retail CD, a volume license CD, and a couple of OEM CDs. The only IBM OEM CD I have, which I haven't had an opportunity to try yet, is about five years more recent than the computer. I don't have high hopes. I may try to recreate an install CD with an appropriate product ID. Don't have high hopes for that, either.

The "five years more recent" line above might indicate why I'm uninterested in installing Windows Se7en.

If the people making the software thought it was ready for prime time, it would be on retail shelves. Since it's not final yet, thats good enough reason for me to consider it not ready as well.

And besides, if the people didn't get a new system by next March or shell out for an OS they likely don't need, then they have a computer that will shut down every two hours. Even if they did buy the new OS, they would have to reinstall.

Windows 7 might be fun to play around and evaluate the compatibility of software, but there is no way I'd ever consider using it in production, much less have someone else I support use it.

Hey, I'm working with what I'm given I did say last resort!

I just get a little bugged when people don't want to spend any money at all on one of the most important tools in the house these days. It's twice as annoying when they don't want to spend any money after that tool breaks. Bitt, you really should have insisted that it wasn't even worth the price of the replacement hard drive to keep a five year old machine going. Not when they can get a brand new Dell that will be good enough for them for about $300.

If you do end up convincing them to buy a new Dell drop me a line.

Just put Ubuntu onto the beast, and tell them it's the latest thing (which it is, actually). They'll be happy.

-ml

The time you've spent messing around with the machine's got to be worth more than $300 by now, surely? Just pick up the cheapest comparable Dell machine and go with either what's on it, or stick (as Mark says) Ubuntu on there...

I just cannot agree that Ubuntu is ready for the average consumer.


It most definitely is. That's probably right about 4-5 hours from Best Buy's Geek Squad.

Definitely not the install process, improved though it is, I still have two machines that it the graphical installer won't even boot on. Both of them had the same problem with 8.04 and still have the same problem with 9.04

Also, I was stunned to find that 9.04 still won't install and boot cleanly under Virtual PC without some tweaking. Surely that has to be a high priority to fix ? They must be losing out on so many potential switcher whose first experience when trying it out as a virtual machine crashes and burns at the first hurdle.

Do they not offer a pre-build virtual machine?

I got tired of dealing with this and figured I'd call up IBM/Lenovo and buy a recovery CD. The odd thing is that this laptop must be seven years old, yet it's still under warranty. So I'm getting a recovery CD sent to me for free.

At the same time, I think a netbook might be a distinct step up.

7 year warranty? That is pretty unusual. Great that they're able to send you a disc though. You can order any random part from IBM even for some ancient machine. It may cost you tho...


Assuming that they don't mind the smaller screen, a cheap netbook would work well. Even the slowest x86 model should be faster than what they've got. Make sure they don't buy one of the non x86 ones though...

This one has a 12.1" 1024x768 screen. The Dell Mini 12 beats that. For like $450.

For the record, it's an IBM Thinkpad X23 with an 800MHz Pentium III Mobile CPU and 128MB RAM.

128mb ram? That has to be horribly unusable under XP these days. SP2 seemed to bump the memory the OS uses up a bit witl all the new plugs for security holes.

A "netbook" with a decent sized screen and keyboard would indeed seem to be a good replacement.

Depends on what apps you're running on it. XP SP3, when quiescent, uses about 80-90Mb.

My XP laptop has 256MB, although with only a 600MHz processor, and even though it only runs Firefox, it thrashes like a stuck pig whenever AVG decides to do one of its regular updates, and takes a long time to become usable after waking up from hibernation.

Peter

Not that I am aware of. Even if they did it wouldn't really deal with all the use cases for trying out Ubuntu under Virtual PC.

For example the last two times I wanted to try out Ubuntu it was to see how the install process now coped with RAID. Virtual PC (or VMWare) are a great way to experiment with RAID setups before committing to the hardware need.

I was annoyed when I spent half a day getting 8.04 to work under Virtual PC. I was bemused when tried 9.04 recently and found it had similar problems. At which point I decided not to waste another half a day and put my Redhat 7.1 -> Ubuntu RAID upgrade off yet again.

The default Ubuntu LiveCD/Installer is very much for the typical desktop / notebook. Andy's uses tend to the extreme, so it's not really suitable for him.

But installer issues can pop up for any O/S, other than MacOS of course. I recently threw in the towel after 10 hours attempting to get WinXP to install boot in a VM (VirtualBox, VMware, etc..).

So it happens. Other than the odd failure, though, Ubuntu is very simple to install on the typical system. And it would be a much easier install than XP is proving to be on the system Bitt is fighting with. Thus, an option.

Cheers

You are partly right Mark, in that my experiences with Ubuntu and Virtual PC were in an attempt to install software RAID. However it wasn't down to anything extreme that the issue occurred.

If you install Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10 or 9.04 under Virtual PC then the earlier versions simply won't boot once you have installed. Once you fix them so they will boot X comes up with a garbled screen. In 9.04 it boots after install ok, but X is still garbled and if I remember rightly the mouse doesn't work. I really don't understand why someone didn't address this somewhere between 8.04 and 9.04, the issues were bugged.

While running Ubuntu under Virtual PC might be an extreme activity in some circles, in the Windows "power user" community it is the natural thing to do when you want to try something new out without building a new machine. Sure you could just boot the live CD, but that isn't quite the same.

At this point someone is going to suggest WUBI. Which is a great idea, except that WUBI is broken on the 9.04 CDs !

Also, when I talked about a couple of PCs I have that won't boot the live CD, they aren't extreme examples at all. One of them is a Dell desktop, the motherboard of while is/was used in a whole series of Dell models (both consumer and small business targeted models) and is therefore sat on hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) of normal users desks. The live CD failed to boot on it in 8.04 and it still fails to boot in 9.04, for the same reason (issues with not liking the SATA controller when it isn't in RAID mode or something like that).



True, I had huge "fun" getting XP onto Eryl's Dell mini 9, convincing XP to install from USB is not easy, even when following online instructions. And getting XP onto modern hardware can be a challenge without all the slipstreaming nonsense.

And I have machines here that won't boot from an XP disk.
They work just fine with various Linux distros, though, including (to my own surprise) the latest Ubuntu experimental release (9.04).

And when the installers actually work as designed, the XP one really sucks for hardware support.

Big deal.

EDIT: And what's all of that got to do with this thread, anyway? Remember.. it's all about a multi-day effort to re-install XP on a machine where it once had been working, apparently. And is no longer, and appears to be unlikely to again. Unless a huge amount of money is paid out for permission to do so once again.

Thus the suggestion of a quite reasonable alternative to spending one's way out of a sticky mess.

Cheers

A dead hard drive doesn't give a crap what operating system you run.

And yes, if they were using Linux they wouldn't have to pay to get back up and running. They also wouldn't have had to pay if they'd kept around the original CD and the key for the OS.

I work with the average consumer almost every day to make my living, and I can't think of an argument that could get me to believe that they are capable of using the operating system long-term.

Ubuntu works better than you might think, but that doesn't really make any difference. If you took your car to the mechanic and got it back with a different transmission, even if it was free, even if the mechanic thought it was better, you'd be pissed.

Sure thing. So basically, you are screwed. The transmission is completely shot, and an identical replacement cannot be purchased. So your options here are now to (1) tell them to buy a new car, or (2) accept a no-cost third-party transmission for the old one. Oh, or give "it back with a different [$200] slower transmission (Vista)" in place of the original one (see above).

Note that the no-cost replacement is still a good thing in either case, as otherwise the machine goes to landfill.

Cheers

An identical replacement can be purchased. The issue is whether the car is worth replacing the whole transmission, and whether I can get the much cheaper part to repair the existing transmission. (This metaphor is getting tortured.)

But it looks like I can get the replacement part, free of charge, so, problem solved. Knock on wood.

And I'm sure there will be more and more of them as XP gets older and older. Which we all know is a different situation to my surprise that Ubuntu still haven't resolved serious known problems with booting the live CD on a whole bunch of common hardware despite having 18 months to do so.

What exactly do you mean by that, 9.04 is their latest mainstream release isn't it ?

The idea that a LiveCD, which works fine on the genuine hardware, won't boot inside a proprietary VM application.. suggests to me that the VM app has a bug or ten.

Now if it were something more mainstream, mature, and third/neutral-party, like VMware failing here, then yeah, I'd agree: bad LiveCD.

Kinda like the issue I was having (until throwing in the towel) trying to get a working XP install to boot inside VMware. You'd really think they'd test that kind of scenario.

That said -- the Ubuntu LiveCDs often do choose peculiar video modes for startup, in an attempt to be font-friendly to the planet. Rather than making language-specific LiveCDs for each of the dozens of supported languages/charsets.

-ml

Do generic manufacturers like Dell still ship CDs for free? I've seen a couple of Dell machines in the past few years (one I purchased and two of friends) that didn't have CDs. They did have some type of restore partition or some-such on the HD, but if you borked your drive, you were done.

Small Biz accounts can ask for the CDs after the sale, and they arrive by FedEx the next day, no charge. Or at least that's how it has worked the last few times around for us. (Note that those CDs are still in the shrink wrap in a box somewhere here, for if/when we discard the machines at EOL)

Non-Biz customers get dinged with threats of a fee for the same service. Some machines can be configured with the discs for extra $$ at purchase time, too.

EDIT: Oh, and there's a way to burn a single OS disc from the recovery partition contents now, too. That's Dell's preferred way of doing it.

Cheers

Depends on the model. For the professional grade machines they do. For the consumer-grade machines, I have no idea. However, I'm certain that if your hard drive failed under warranty that they'd send a recovery CD in addition to the hard drive. Getting that CD without a warranty, though, I'm not sure.

Many manufacturers have a utility for you to burn your own recovery CD set from the OS, which they suggest you do first thing. I suppose that saves them 8¢ a system.

The last three machines I bought from Dell (over the last 12 months) all still came with recovery CDs. Two were very much consumer aimed machines, one was a "business class" laptop.

The Dell Mini 9 ships with a recovery CD, but doesn't ship with a CD drive...

Mark, what was the issue you were having with installing XP in a VM?

If it was anything like my issues I had installing XP in a VM, it was probably the device drivers for the hard disk. You have to do the thing where you press S during install and supply it with a third party floppy disc image. Only problem is, I tried that, and it still didn't work.

I'm surprised that you've had trouble getting XP to work. Its always worked fine for me with no problems at all. It is just as hard to install XP to a SCSI HD. VMware emulates IDE in Server & Workstation so you don't even need a driver. ESX 4.0 does IDE now as well but the driver disk always worked fine if you used the SCSI emulation.

Booting, not installing:

Hung at boot time on Mup.sys, when booting the VM from a real-life partition. I've abandoned the effort now, so don't waste any grey cells on it -- I found a Linux program that does what the corp. machine usually did only under XP.

Cheers

That's more or less the model every mfgr is going to. Certainly the last four machines I've purchased did it that way.

So did you get your problem fixed, Bitt? I assume the replacement CD would pretty much take care of it all.

I have a somewhat related question, too: I recently had wipe my main computer (pretty bad viruses). Sadly I was too dumb to check if my WinXP case had the discs still in it.

So now I have a case with a product code (and the second disc with service pack 2 on it) but no disc. I don't suppose it's possible to get a replacement from Microsoft, is it? This was an OEM copy I bought through Newegg...

I figure this is a pretty dumb question, but I thought I'd ask just in case

Microsoft has a downloadable copy of XP on MSDN. See here for information.

I got past the license key part of the installation, but I'm still arguing with it.

First, I have to point out how … odd the recovery was. It came on two CDs which appear to be CD-Rs that had the labels silkscreened on by hand. It booted into Windows98 command prompt mode and loaded a DOS CD driver in order to … I'm not totally sure; format the hard drive, maybe? Then it rebooted itself and proceeded to copy the XP installation to C:\i386 by extracting what must have been fifty ZIP files. Then it rebooted again into the normal Windows XP installation which they had somehow scripted. Then it booted into XP where it automatically installed a bunch of IBM-specific software. It rebooted several times while doing this. Finally it ran sysprep on itself and rebooted again, where I finally got to interact with the OS. This all took about 45 minutes.

Then once it was installed, it was XP SP0. No service pack at all. You know how XP service packs are supposed to be all-inclusive, so that you don't need to install intermediate service packs? Like Microsoft says: "SP3 includes all previously released Windows XP updates, including security updates, hotfixes, and select out-of-band releases." Of course, it then goes on to say "To install SP3, either Windows XP Service Pack 1a (SP1a) or Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) must already be installed." I don't think the folks over at Microsoft really understand that "all previously released" means. So I got to install SP2, then SP3. Each one of those took probably half an hour.

Then onto the post-SP3 updates, of which there are dozens. Those took another hour or so. (Remember that this is a P3M with 128MB of RAM. If I had a PC133 SODIMM lying around, I'd give it to her.)

Then I realized that the recovery CD had formatted the new 150GB hard drive into a 30GB partition. So I had to go download a filesystem resizer. (EASEUS is free for home use and works pretty well, BTW.)

All of this, BTW, was while its ethernet was hooked up to my MacBook because the WiFi card doesn't support anything beyond WEP. Not that I'm sure that's relevant anyway; I can't even get it to see the half dozen networks available around here. I think it's broken somehow. Haven't figured that one out yet. I did manage to completely screw up the OS while trying to fix it, though, so I got to recover again. That was another three or four hours.

Internet Explorer occasionally forgets how to make network connections, which makes downloading stuff fun.

The IBM software update utility that came with the system no longer works, and the one that replaced it no longer works, either. And IBM/Lenovo gives you a matrix for the specific model, but there are enough variations of the model that it can be hard to figure out which hardware you have, what you need to download, and what is already installed. Add onto that that the downloads are named descriptive things like "7avu43ww.exe" and don't actually install anything, but merely extract themselves to such unique directories as "C:\DRIVERS\WIN", and getting updates is just a nightmare.

So I'm still arguing with it. And I haven't even gotten to restoring data yet.

Thanks for the tip! The only thing that worries me (and that I neglected to mention in my post) was that I have XP MCE. Do you know if they have that available as well?

MSDN has XP MCE 2005, nothing newer.

Be warned that the link provided does not have links to the direct MSDN downloads, but rather torrents off a torrent site. I personally wouldn't trust an OS downloaded from a torrent site, since spyware could also be slipstreamed in.

Actually, I only linked there because I thought the MSDN ISO download page was behind a password. Turns out it isn't. Nice of Microsoft to provide SHA1 hashes so you can make sure you downloaded the image properly.

Login required to download, though.

Yeah. Too bad that. Too bad there's nowhere else you could get it from and have some way to determine whether or not it was the real thing.

Yep, a cryin' shame, that.

Actually, 2005 is what I have already, and that's technically the last version of "Windows Media Center Edition". After XP they've merely made it part of the more complete flavors of Windows.


Tony, I can't figure out how to download anything from that page. Don't you need one of those MSDN subscriptions? I have a Windows Live ID from when I downloaded 7, but I'm not able to download anything on that page.

Yes, you do need an MSDN subscription. But without a subscription, do you still see the file hashes? You can then combine this with the earlier link to make sure that the torrents haven't been interfered with.

I can't check, because I do have an MSDN subscription, and I can download the files.

I do see the file hashes. I'm not familiar with how to compare them, though. How does that work?

Windows

everything else