WinXP Activation

[Karl Kidder]

Hi all,

WinXP Home with all the critical updates, up-to-date anti-virus, adaware,
spybot, firewalled. I turned the computer on this morning, attempted to
login to my profile and XP asks to activate the OS. Mind you, I had
previously completed this several months back. I attempted to complete a
repair via my XP disk. I cannot access my profile in safe mode either as it
wants to complete activation here as well. It will not complete the
activation process. I have never seen anything like this. Any help would be
appreciated.

Thanks,
Karl

 

[¹©¤¤ Ben]

Tell MS about this, email or telephone.

 

[Alex Nichol]

WinXP Home with all the critical updates, up-to-date anti-virus, adaware,
spybot, firewalled. I turned the computer on this morning, attempted to
login to my profile and XP asks to activate the OS. Mind you, I had
previously completed this several months back. I attempted to complete a
repair via my XP disk. I cannot access my profile in safe mode either as it
wants to complete activation here as well. It will not complete the
activation process. I have never seen anything like this.

The only sensible course is to run
Start - All Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Activate Windows
and use the option to do so by phoning in. This will take maybe ten
minutes on a toll free call, but much less than fiddling around would
take.

It most likely resulted from either a sudden apparent change of hardware
(I have had it after disabling a network card and rebooting with it
disabled), or from damage to the records in windows\system32\wpa.dbl and
wpa.bak

It is worth making a back up of those to a floppy so that if it happens
again, you could unwind any such hardware change, copy the files back
and reboot. Note that this does *not* work across a reformat of the
system: there you have to reactivate but can do it on the net like first
time