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Multi Manufacturer Pre-Activation


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Packard Bell are AFAIK manufactured by NEC.

The Packard Bell computers i have seen says NEC on the XP license label :)

Has anyone actually gotten this to work automaticly yet? :)

Edited by druiddk
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@Bezalel

I was talking an Admin at work about this thread, while trying to get info on the servers. :whistle:

He asked an interesting question, that I said i'd pass on;

Could the scripts in the activation.rar be limited to using only the first 8 or 10 digits of the Manufacturers Hex ?

That way you shouldn't need a load of OEM filesets for Dell's, Acer's and HP's.

Think this could work if older "sp0 & sp1" OEMBIOS files are being used, newer big vendor machines like newer DELL's are being shipped with SP2 and contain OEMBIOS that use a more "strict" system...

I noticed Bezalel files are sp2 files (at least by looking at the date eg; 2004)

to test this statement I would like to have some DELL OEMBIOS files that are dated 2001 or something smiliar...anyone can help me with that?

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This just came into my mind: What about product keys?!?

Can you use just one OEM key for all manufacturers or do I have to somehow find out each manufacturers master key?

I wonder because WGA also checks the product key and it would be easy for Microsoft, to have a list of master keys matching only to appropriate manufacturer.

Is there a master key list or is this completely unnecessary?

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This just came into my mind: What about product keys?!?

Can you use just one OEM key for all manufacturers or do I have to somehow find out each manufacturers master key?

I wonder because WGA also checks the product key and it would be easy for Microsoft, to have a list of master keys matching only to appropriate manufacturer.

Is there a master key list or is this completely unnecessary?

The keys are mostly interchangable between manufacturers. (I've heard of isolated cases where keys were not interchangable but I am more inclined to beleive there was a user error in these cases.) For the benefit of businesses that no longer have access to the manufacturer's keys there are a few keys published at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...y/oempreac.mspx. Before Feb 2005 manufacturers did not always include their keys in the recovery media because the sticker-key could be used to activate online. (They only cared about the first boot experiance, not recovery experiance.)

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FreeStyler,

I have both Toshiba and IBM pro filesets dated 2001, if thats any good to you ?

Ah, think i have proper files for those, actually i meant older DELL oembios files only....

it doesn't succesfully activate with newer OEMBIOS files from DELL XP Professional SP2 Media

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Although my method is currently working SFC is aware that the files have been changed because oembios.cat was parsed before the files were changed. If the end user ever runs SFC manually they will be prompted for the oembios files that match the origional oembios.ca_ that was left on the CD. My two question now are:

When SFC parses the oembios.cat file where does it store the thumbprints of the remaining oembios files? (I am able to delete the oembios.cat file, it is not protected but SFC still knows that the files aren't origional)

oembios.ca_ replacement may require to rebuild database as described in MS KB822798 Article - Method 3

I haven't checked myself if it would works, which OEMBIOS.* should we use in a MS virtual machine :}

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FreeStyler,

I have both Toshiba and IBM pro filesets dated 2001, if thats any good to you ?

Ah, think i have proper files for those, actually i meant older DELL oembios files only....

it doesn't succesfully activate with newer OEMBIOS files from DELL XP Professional SP2 Media

Let me know if you still need the older Dell OEMBIOS files...I have the following Dell OEM CD's:

XP Pro Gold

XP Home Gold

XP Pro with SP1

XP Home with SP1a

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jrf2027, sure i would love to get the "gold" ones

BTW, HOME and PRO oembios.* are suposed to be the same (to be sure, can you do a md5 compare on them?)

If you have access to the computers the XP runs on, can you dump their BIOS/DMI info for me and send me those text files?

Download this tool

http://crystalmark.info/download/download....=CrystalDMI.zip

Unzip & Run it -> Select “All Information” from the dropdown box -> CTRL + C

Then preferably paste (CTRL + P) the copied info into separate txt files.

I am currently working with "BIOS" patched Microsoft Virtual PC's to test as many oembios files as i can, for some strange reason up to now DELL, SONY, SAMSUNG oembios files always fail the SLP :(

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BTW, HOME and PRO oembios.* are suposed to be the same (to be sure, can you do a md5 compare on them?)

I don' t think they are exactly the same. But, in my experience, at least they worked vice-versa.

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How do I figure out what to rename the OEMBIOS files to?

I have my own sets from HP, IBM, Dell and NEC...

The opening post has a script that reports the manufacturer, model, and a hex representation of the manufacturer. The filenames should be the same as the hex representation of the manufacturer but without the spaces.

In the future I plan to create a folder with these names and leave the filenames intact.

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@Bezalel

What if a developer string has additional spaces behind the actual manufacturer string?

Lets say I i have a HP box, which is being reported as:

Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard

Model: Virtual Machine

4865776C 6574742D 5061636B 61726420 20202020 20202020 20202020 202020

Can your script filter out the additional spaces or can you make/modify your script so it checks if, when no exact match is being found files with a partially the same pattern (4865776C6574742D5061636B617264) are being used?

FreeStyler

Edited by FreeStyler
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