Vista reactivation with new HD make sense?

[nZone]

Does it really make sense? Vista Ultimate comes with backup suite. It's all good and all that.
My raid 0 failed; I bought a new set of drives to replace and then restore from the Windows Complete. I thought all was good after the recovery. Then, I was surprised when I opened "Welcome Screen" and clicked me detail; under windows registration it said: you must reactivate windows today or windows will stop function (not exact quote but similar in that nature). I think it may allow only 3 days because I replaced the HD two days before.

It's just very inconvenient and stealthy.

 

[Smilin]

Some items carry more weight than others when determining if a reactivation is necessary. Swapping the actual drive the OS is installed on would be a pretty good hint that we've switched PCs altogether. So yeah, not terribly surprised.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: nZone
Does it really make sense? Vista Ultimate comes with backup suite. It's all good and all that.
My raid 0 failed; I bought a new set of drives to replace and then restore from the Windows Complete. I thought all was good after the recovery. Then, I was surprised when I opened "Welcome Screen" and clicked me detail; under windows registration it said: you must reactivate windows today or windows will stop function (not exact quote but similar in that nature). I think it may allow only 3 days because I replaced the HD two days before.

It's just very inconvenient and stealthy.

Inconvienent? How often do drives really fail? Is it really that much of a problem if that causes reactivation to occur? Is it not accepting online activation?

 

[nZone]

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: nZone
Does it really make sense? Vista Ultimate comes with backup suite. It's all good and all that.
My raid 0 failed; I bought a new set of drives to replace and then restore from the Windows Complete. I thought all was good after the recovery. Then, I was surprised when I opened "Welcome Screen" and clicked me detail; under windows registration it said: you must reactivate windows today or windows will stop function (not exact quote but similar in that nature). I think it may allow only 3 days because I replaced the HD two days before.

It's just very inconvenient and stealthy.

Inconvienent? How often do drives really fail? Is it really that much of a problem if that causes reactivation to occur? Is it not accepting online activation?

I have to call them up; could not do online or automated phone. I have to speak to a support rep.

 

[Frintin]

Only ever had to call up Microsoft once when I was putting together a Media Center PC and used Media Center edition of Windows XP.

It took me a while trying to decide what hard drive I wanted in it from my parts, changed video cards etc. all within a week. I had to call 3 or 4 times. Never had a problem with the representatives I talked to.

It can feel like a terrible inconvenience at the time to have to phone (talking on the phone is a time consuming process.) You will be writing down a lot of numbers LOL!

 

[hellokeith]

Originally posted by: nZone
It's just very inconvenient and stealthy.

Translation: You've bought into the performance of RAID 0 without weighing the risk of disk failure and volume corruption.

 

[aj654987]

I think some of his surprise was the 3 day limit which seems very short when you figure than in an HD failure, someone may need new parts shipped in and by then it would have deactivated itself.

 

[Nothinman]

Translation: You've bought into the performance of RAID 0 without weighing the risk of disk failure and volume corruption.

Looks like your universal translator needs recalibrated. He backed up his data so dealing with the failed disk wasn't the problem, the problem was that Vista needed to reactivate after he replaced the drives which most likely would have happened even if the disks weren't RAIDed.

I think some of his surprise was the 3 day limit which seems very short when you figure than in an HD failure, someone may need new parts shipped in and by then it would have deactivated itself.

The reactivation happened after the replacement. It might be an issue if it wants to reactivate if you remove 1 drive from a RAID1 or RAID5 set, but that seems unlikely.

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Some items carry more weight than others when determining if a reactivation is necessary. Swapping the actual drive the OS is installed on would be a pretty good hint that we've switched PCs altogether. So yeah, not terribly surprised.

You are kidding, right?

Even if EVERY piece of hardware is the same, swapping the boot drive(s) out qualifies as a "new PC"? :Q

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Raduque

Originally posted by: Smilin
Some items carry more weight than others when determining if a reactivation is necessary. Swapping the actual drive the OS is installed on would be a pretty good hint that we've switched PCs altogether. So yeah, not terribly surprised.

You are kidding, right?

Even if EVERY piece of hardware is the same, swapping the boot drive(s) out qualifies as a "new PC"? :Q

In general, it seems fairly reasonable to ask the OS to be reactivated after it's been restored from a backup image, because it's not that hard to set up multiple nearly-identical PCs. However, it would've been an interesting experiment to soft-modify the HDDs' serial numbers to match the old ones, and see if the activation stuck. I don't know how that gets translated in the case of a RAID0 array, though.

 

[Keleka]

I had the same things happen but i rebuilit my entire system after installing Vista on my old system. I enventually had to pay for another XP Home edition key as i was gonna pay another 150 bucks for Vista. I've dealt with their email support and today got a letter saying i needed to call this number and that they might charge me a 10 dollar fee to get that license working once again.... I haven't decided if i want to call them or not Vista wont run much of the software i like and them doing away with EAX as well as Direct Sound was a HUGE mistake.

Keleka

 

[RebateMonger]

I'm a bit surprised by all the Vista re-Activation threads. I thought MS stated that Vista would be MORE lenient than XP on requiring re-Activations. XP NEVER required re-Activation when "only" a hard drive was replaced.

It's been noted in other threads that changes are likely cumulative. Only the hard drive was replaced, BUT were other things changed lately too? Under the "old" system, XP would count up the number of changes in the last 120 days and base its decision on that.

It's also possible that Vista's backup has some sort of automatic trigger that requires re-Activation upon a System Restoration?

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Raduque

Originally posted by: Smilin
Some items carry more weight than others when determining if a reactivation is necessary. Swapping the actual drive the OS is installed on would be a pretty good hint that we've switched PCs altogether. So yeah, not terribly surprised.

You are kidding, right?

Even if EVERY piece of hardware is the same, swapping the boot drive(s) out qualifies as a "new PC"? :Q

Reading comprehension FTW. I said some items carry more weight than others.

No one item that I know of is enough to to trigger activation. Swapping the drive alone will not do it. It is a cumlative process though. Each change adds to a point total until a trigger is reached. Same thing with XP. A drive swap *usually* won't cause a trigger but it's possible.

 

[Griffinhart]

It's not quite the same situation as the original post, but I found it interesting.

I did an inplace upgrade from WinXP to Vista three weeks ago and activated it. My Machine has two RAID 0 arrays and the boot array failed on me. I did a fresh install on the good array and Windows let me activate it again. On XP the same situation would have required me to call Microsoft to activate. That wasn't the case this time.

 

[nZone]

Originally posted by: Griffinhart
It's not quite the same situation as the original post, but I found it interesting.

I did an inplace upgrade from WinXP to Vista three weeks ago and activated it. My Machine has two RAID 0 arrays and the boot array failed on me. I did a fresh install on the good array and Windows let me activate it again. On XP the same situation would have required me to call Microsoft to activate. That wasn't the case this time.

I had the opposite experience; in MCE 2005 (basically an XP); I had restored from backup image (using acronis software) many times due to hard drives failure or some other things. I've never got to have to reactivate the MCE2005; even I had couple new hardware since the image was snapped.

For Vista; my backup image was done using the built-in backup utility. May be the capacity of the drives matter? The image was done on two 80GB hard drives; the new drives are 160GB and from different vendor. May be Microsoft thinks that hard drive will last forever and that it will never need a replacement.

The thing that makes it inconvenient is that I have to give explanation when speak to support staffs. May be it's me.

 

[corkyg]

This is an interesting thread. It seems that the whole process of what constitutes a "system" change varies. The OS final decision is determined by a mathematical calculation of many factors - known as the "hash."

I am sensing that Vista may be more sensitive than XP. I have changed hard drives every week for the past several years with XP pro and never had to reactivate.

On the other hand, my Adobe Acrobat (full standard) always requires reactivation with every HDD change. (A real PITA!) But, it has a feature to TRANSFER the activation. If I remember to do that before changing drives, then, no problem. They take back the activation, and then I use it on the new drive.

It seems that Vista's behavior in this area is not consistent. Another good reason not to hurry up and change OS's. 🙂

 

[fraquar]

Originally posted by: nZone
The thing that makes it inconvenient is that I have to give explanation when speak to support staffs. May be it's me.

You should have Microsoft give you a detailed explanation like that when they want you to upgrade an OS. I'm sorry Microsoft, what was that? You want me to upgrade to Vista? I'll have to put you on hold........{chimes pipe music}.