New
#1
(Re-) Activate, or Flatten and Re-install?
I have exhausted YouTube, and tried dozens of Google solutions (including several from this forum) to rid my system of the Windows Activation "This copy of Windows is not genuine" error. I am an experienced Unix/Linux administrator, but this one has me baffled. But then of course, this IS a Microsoft product, <Golum> AND WE HATES THEM </Golum>. I have spent many dozens of hours researching various solutions to this.
And this is just another reason to hate.
I built this thing myself last year. The motherboard has built-in hardware mirroring. I purchased 2 OC SSD disks, and mirrored these for Drive C, and then 2 1TB Samsung disks, and mirrored these. This is Drive E. Drive D: is the backup partition.
A few months after the install, one of the SSD disks failed. Since it was mirrored, this was No Big Deal, and I sent it back to OC to re-init. Of course, they sent it back and now it won't even be recognized as a disk, so I have not re-installed it.
So, the first question--does un-mirroring somehow inactivate a perfectly legitimate Win 7 installation?
Some months later, the motherboard itself also croaked. I replaced it. I suspect that one or the other of these events caused Win 7 to inactivate itself. My research indicates that changing out the motherboard may be the cause of this problem. It makes no sense to me, but then many things Microsoft does makes no sense to me. If I could completely eliminate Microsoft products from my life, my stress levels would drop measurably. But they are the 800lb Gorilla in the living room. They can't be ignored.
Now when I look at start-->computer-->properties, it shows an OEM product key that does not match the key that I installed.
I have the proper key in a handy-dandy text file, so I don't have typing mistakes.
If I try to activate it online, I get an "error code 0x80070005 Access is denied" error.
I then tried to activate it by calling the Windows activation phone number. The wizard gives me a drop down box to identify my country. When I enter United States, I immediately get the "error code 0x80070005 Access is denied" which is becoming very rapidly boring.
When I clear the error, a dialog box is displayed, showing the attached .png file.
As you can see, it does not provide a Windows ID number. I called the phone number, and the We Hate Our Customers system asked me to enter this number.
Eventually, it let me speak to an actual person, who also asked for this number. When I told him this was blank, he told me to shut down the machine, wait for 10 minutes, then re-try the phone activation with this Windows ID number.
Of course it is blank again, and again and again.
I called, and was told that this did not happen. Eventually, I was routed to some else at Microsoft, who helpfully suggested that the cause of this problem is some virus or malware. My malware and virus definitions are up to date. They could not tell me WHICH virus this might be.
They then offered to charge me $140 to fix an $80 piece of software. Since this is a public forum and children of tender years may be reading this, I will not write here my counter-suggestion, but suffice it to say that it was absurdly anatomically impossible.
Question number two then, is there any way to fix this?
Or do I have to back up my system to my always-reliable Linux box, and re-format the SSD and re-install the OS from the get-go? This does appear to be how Microsoft solves most of its problems.
I have more than a dozen applications installed. Though I have all the installation media, it would take me a very long time to re-install them and recover all the data files from the Linux system (running Samba).
When I purchased this Windows 7 disk (from Newegg) I purchased 2 others just like it. One alternative would be to use one of the other product keys, but I have little hope that this will work, and will probably invalidate that product key also.
Does anyone have authoritative knowledge of how Windows 7 Activation actually works? I've tried sluimgr and slmgr programs. I tried stopping the Software Protection service--it wasn't running anyway. Starting it is useless also.
The solution I am looking for would activate the Windows system without actually getting permission from, or contacting Microsoft in any way, since the problem is apparently on their end.
Quote