New
#1
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 ?