installation id blank

[le_pinceau]

Hi I am a newbie to your forum, but I do work on these systems forever it seems, I am presently working on a load of Win XP Pro on a new system dressed as follows:

Gigabyte GA-965P DQ6 Main Board

Intel Core Two Duo E4600

Kingston KVR800D2N5/1G x2 (dual channel)

LGE Multi-layer DVD WR Lite Scribe

Seagate 3500320AS 500 Gig SATA II x4 in RAID 5 configuration (Intel 32 bit ICH 8R/DO/DH SATA Raid Controller)

ATI 2400XT PCI-E VIdeo Display

that sums up the important stuff I think

Like I say; this is a clean install and everything goes tickity BOOOO, until the tail end of the load when I am promted to log on to the administrator profile and I get the "must be activated" message, no 30 day grace period.

Ethernet of course is not loaded in the O/S so I do the telephone activation when on line 3 where you would normally find the installation key, it's blank. I have tried to talk to microsoft and they tell me to reboot it where it should reappear, ( NOT) I was able to log in one time in safe mode under administrator loaded the video driver but wouldn't let me relog back to do anything else. I might have to reload again and see if I can tweak the registry (microsoft forums gives me that direction), but I thought I might try you first.

thanks for any and all advice in advance, I appreciate it.

le_pinceau

[le_pinceau]

Ok Update

I have been reading a number of posts that seem to be on track. When you use the microsoft key for your O/S on the load of your system it uses that in conjunction with some sort of hash code from the hardware you have onboard to create the product id for your system. It appears that by changing the hardware specifications (swapped ram and reduced amount) it triggered the 30 day grace period and allowed me to log on (only once I might add) and then started to load device drivers, windows aparently foced a reboot at which time I then had a Configuration error "use your windows CD to log on and use "R" to recover" I chose to reinstall with the new configuration and no errors or trouble at all. I know some of you must have been knocking your head and I want to thank you, knocked heads are always welcome sign of assistance.

thanks for letting me vent if nothing else.

regards

le_pinceau