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Vista Ultimate


IcemanND

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I haven't had a chance to rant about Microsoft or vendor support since 2005, mater of fact I wasn't even a moderator when I posted this: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=38820&hl= And Microsoft replies by pointing me to my own forum topic.

So here's today irritant and if anyone has a possible solution I would love to give it a try.

Have Lenovo systems at work, many of them have the OEM loaded Vista Ultimate installed and we just uninstalled the crap we didn't want. So Friday we released SP2 from WSUS and of the 75 vista machines that needed it 9 successfully installed (supposedly) seems more like it failed on every machine it touched. We unappaproved SP2 because we started getting reports from users of issues, mostly failures of one kind or another where SP2 failed and is now reverting changes. On 90% of those machines it fails, reverts and everything is fine. On half of the remaining machines you get a message saying "Reinstall Windows"

reinstallwindows.png

With these machines if you click the link in the windows which brings up IE and jump through the hoops to launch an elevated CMD prompt window you can issues the following three commands and reactive windows and be on your way.

slmgr.vbs -cpky

slmgr.vbs -upk

slmgr.vbs -rilc

Reboot and you are on your way.

On the remaining 5% of the machines you get the lovely window we have all seen at some point and time "The Windows Vista Ultimate product key you typed is invalid for activation." And then you have the option of running in reduced functionality mode, entering a new license number or contacting OEM support (Lenovo). Running slmgr with any switch results in an error message of 0xc004e017, which seems to point to KMS issues which these machines should not be trying to activate against our corporate KMS, remember it is an OEM install they don't have to activate.

So I figured it can't hurt to call Lenovo, first guy though he didn't know much tried to be as helpful as possible and actually bumped me to second level support very quickly when he realized he was in over his head. Second level on the other hand accused me of reimaging the machine using a modified image of Lenovo's and his only answer was to run the Lenovo System Restore. Thanks for nothing.

So it can't hurt to use one of my Technet Free Tech Support tickets right? Even more worthless than calling Lenovo. Matter of fact after talking to three people the only answer they would provide was to call Lenovo.

Ok, rant over if anyone sees this and has a possible solution I'm all ears as I have about a dozen machines I'm about to start reloading and I would much rather just fix the issue than back up data and start from scratch.

Edit: DON'T even suggest any of the activation cracks/hacks, ain't gonna fly in the corporate environment and it violates rule 1 on the forum.

Edited by CoffeeFiend
replaced your uncropped 1MB bmp attachment by a 78Kb lossless PNG :p
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I'm pretty sure you can't activate MAK keys. When we do OA2 activation not only use slmgr to put in the product key, but also install a license file as well. So basically you can only activate the product if the license file is present, and the SLP also but don't know if you use that. Any one of those missing will cause it to fail. That's all I can tell you about that.

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Like I said I shouldn't even have to activate. It being the Lenovo OEM load it should be permanently activated. Something with the SP2 install and subsequent failure hosed it and the only support I can get is "Push the Blue Button to restore your system"

If I'm going to reload the system it will get my Vista Enterprise image, I'm certainly not going to reload the bloatware image from Lenovo. I'm hoping to avoid imaging it in any way I can.

As I have not had the pleasure of dealing with OEM product installation since early XP I afraid I'm way behind the game on that one. Can you provide details on the process, maybe I can get it working yet even if I have to copy some files from the other machines that do work.

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Well like I said, you need those three things to maintain activation. Its possible the update removed or changed one of those (Windows based) items, which will switch off the activation. The problem is that you aren't going to have the required files to fix it. So either do a repair install or a recovery would be your best bet. Also Lenovo isn't going to be able to give you those files either, but they may be able to get you a key to activate it.

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