Windows 7: Restore Win7 Image to Advanced Format Disk - Not Genuine Windows

I bought some new Seagate hard drives that happened to have this feature . . . but I wasn't reading the fine print when I bought them.

"Seagate SmartAlign™ technology1 provides a transition to 4K sectors without the need for software utilities"

When restoring Windows 7 disk images to these drives from a disk image that is fully setup for our business, the resulting installation would get flagged as Not Genuine Windows. We were just changing drives, not the computers so the installations were still Activated, but they were no longer Genuine. We tried activating with a new unused key and it would still be flagged as Not Genuine.

MGADiage.exe would report a list of about 10 altered files on the restored drives.

Finally I tried an in-place upgrade with Windows 7 SP1 Pro media to fix the problem while saving the drive setup. Toward the end of the installaton, the pop-up "Windows Setup could not configure Windows to run on this computer's hardware" and setup quite and ran a Rollback, undoing the upgrade process. I did this twice after restoring two different images to the computer.

The message above led me to the "Advanced 4kb Formatting of the drives as the probable source of the problem.

I tried a clean install of Windows 7 on the same Lenovo T500 with the new drive and that works fine, but it would take a couple of days and some licensing hassles with other applications to do a completely new install instead of using the image. (remember we are just changing drives not change computers, but some of our apps won't reinstall without new licenses)

The Question:

Is there a way to make our deployment images work on the new drives ?

Have you tried using the premium Acronis cloning/imaging app which comes free with Seagate? Seagate Acronis cloning free util

I'd try a direct clone between drives first. The manual is easy to understand and on the download page.

I just downloaded the Seagate Disk Wizard - Powered by Acronis from this page.

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/

(by the way, you helped on another thread a couple of days ago concerning "Genuine" issues. All of the problems I had were actuallly caused by this particular imaging issue, nothing do to with licensing or media types. I though that thread was too long to amend however)

What imaging app are you using now? Acronis always works for me.

Hi, its just possible that you are having the same problem as i have had,, if you look at my post of a few minutes ago, it may help you

I have been using Windows 7 and Server 2008 imaging almost daily since they came out. I have transferred installations between workstations and servers many times and have never had an problem. I am pretty sure the target drive 4k sector design is the issue since Genuine Windows validation failure happened with two target drives and two source images. (this never happen before with other image transfers)

At your recommendation, I tried the Seagate/Acronis utility, but I could not get Acronis to clone a 60G Partition on a 500G drive to a 320G drive. The rest of the source 500G drive was unallocated. Windows 7 imaging let you go to a smaller drive if the source partition fits on the smaller drive and the rest of the source drive is unallocated. I bought and downloaded the full version of Acronis but it also will not let me go to a smaller drive. Maybe Acronis partition backup / recovery could be used to get to a smaller driver but I haven't tried that yet.

So I used Windows 7 to transfer my source 60G partition to a 160G drive so I could then clone it using Acronis to the 320G drive. As I was cloning to my final 320G drive, the power supply for the USB/SATA adaptor went-nuts and destroyed my 320G drive. While trying to figure out what happened I detroyed a second hard drive with the USB/SATA adaptor.

So I never found out if if Acronis will get around the problem of imaging to the 4K sector hard drive. I will get back to this when I replace the USB/SATA adaptor.

[QUOTE=RALPH BOLTON;1900958]Hi, its just possible that you are having the same problem as i have had,, if you look at my post of a few minutes ago, it may help you[QUOTE=swbca;1900436]

Interesting about the two OEM keys, but that isn't the cause of my problem. In my case imaging is causing a Genuine validation failue with a Retail or OEM installation . . and will still come up as Non-Genuine after activating with a new unused retail key on a retail installation. It only happens when I attempt to image to the 4kb Advanced Format drives. The same images have no problem when restored to other drives.

I know this sounds strange to anyone who uses imaging on a daily basis, but the MGADiag.exe http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=203456 tool shows exactly the same list of altered files each time I restore to the 4kb sector drives . . and that causes the Genuine Validation failure

Can you use the Acronis boot disk to reimage the HD in it's own machine, rather than connected elsewhere using an adapter? If this is how you're imaging then it may well be your problem.

The Not Genuine problem has always been where I used Windows 7 imaging and the target drive was in the machine. The source image is on a USB drive. I just got back from Micro-Center to replace my fried drives. I just restored 3 images to 3 systems and all is good. I did not get drives that use 4K sectors.

I haven't yet completed any imaging with Acronis because my adaptor detroyed the drive before the image was complete.

This is my first exposure to Acronis and I know it is the best way to go. I am looking forward to leaning more about how to use it. I was wondering if it had a boot disk . . that good.

Yes you'll want to read the Manual on the WD Dowloads page which is quite easy to understand and contains Section 11 on Creating Bootable Rescue Media: http://support.wdc.com/download/note...erguide_en.pdf