Product Activation Key is invalid?

[Guest]

Good afternoon. I work in a small computer firm in western North Carolina, A
Plus Computers. One of my customers had a bad hard drive, which we replaced,
and reinstalled Windows XP Home on. I have tried to use the product key,
which is from the sticker IBM put on the side of his computer, which I have
deemed to be a valid key from the presentation of it. The problem I am
running into is that the key is said to be invalid and Im not quite certain
how, but Im hoping that someone here can tell me how a genuine Microsoft
sticker ended up with a bad key on it. Thank you for your time.

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Did you reinstall Windows XP using IBM's recovery CD
or procedure? The IBM provided Product Key is only
valid when using IBM's recommended restore method.

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:

| Good afternoon. I work in a small computer firm in western North Carolina, A
| Plus Computers. One of my customers had a bad hard drive, which we replaced,
| and reinstalled Windows XP Home on. I have tried to use the product key,
| which is from the sticker IBM put on the side of his computer, which I have
| deemed to be a valid key from the presentation of it. The problem I am
| running into is that the key is said to be invalid and Im not quite certain
| how, but Im hoping that someone here can tell me how a genuine Microsoft
| sticker ended up with a bad key on it. Thank you for your time.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

OEM keys are not compatible with Retail CDs and vise versa.

 

[Ron Martell]

Good afternoon. I work in a small computer firm in western North Carolina, A
Plus Computers. One of my customers had a bad hard drive, which we replaced,
and reinstalled Windows XP Home on. I have tried to use the product key,
which is from the sticker IBM put on the side of his computer, which I have
deemed to be a valid key from the presentation of it. The problem I am
running into is that the key is said to be invalid and Im not quite certain
how, but Im hoping that someone here can tell me how a genuine Microsoft
sticker ended up with a bad key on it. Thank you for your time.

Did you reinstall the Windows XP from the original disks provided by
IBM? If not then the IBM supplied product key will likely not work.

Note: Many IBM computers do not come with a CD. They have a "system
recovery" disk image stored in a second partition on the hard drive,
and there is a utility included that will create a bootable recovery
CD from that partition. If the old drive is still usable at all you
may want to try to get at the recovery partition on it and use the XP
Image there to install on the new hard drive.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada