edwinbradford
Junior Member
Hi everyone,
This seems impossible to me. I was tweaking with shell32.dll to customize the god dam awfulness of Windows interface after having been used to OSX when unsurprisingly I hacked XP to death. I foresaw this happening as I was experimenting a lot, so had previously made disk images of the XP partition on a separate hard disk which I've restored previously no problem.
However, on this occasion when I restored the partition, XP asked for the Windows Product Activation code. My query is how can that be? The data for the activation code is stored within Windows itself and although it evaluates my hardware on boot there's no data stored outside Windows to the best of my knowledge. So restoring a disk image of a complete partition to the same original partition merely resets the machine to how it was a week ago surely.
So is there something in the BIOS or the MBR partition management sector on the system disk or something that's triggered the call? I'd really like to set up a disk imaging backup system that doesn't require product activation every time.
What with the Registry and Product Activation I honestly feel Windows is so piss poor after having used Mac and Unix systems. No offense intended to anyone.
Sigh.
This seems impossible to me. I was tweaking with shell32.dll to customize the god dam awfulness of Windows interface after having been used to OSX when unsurprisingly I hacked XP to death. I foresaw this happening as I was experimenting a lot, so had previously made disk images of the XP partition on a separate hard disk which I've restored previously no problem.
However, on this occasion when I restored the partition, XP asked for the Windows Product Activation code. My query is how can that be? The data for the activation code is stored within Windows itself and although it evaluates my hardware on boot there's no data stored outside Windows to the best of my knowledge. So restoring a disk image of a complete partition to the same original partition merely resets the machine to how it was a week ago surely.
So is there something in the BIOS or the MBR partition management sector on the system disk or something that's triggered the call? I'd really like to set up a disk imaging backup system that doesn't require product activation every time.
What with the Registry and Product Activation I honestly feel Windows is so piss poor after having used Mac and Unix systems. No offense intended to anyone.
Sigh.
