Steve said:
I don't know, but you'd kinda think so. I'll have to check on that
later at work. We use hardware drive duplicating devices to "clone"
drives and don't use sysprep, but all our OEM stuff is usually
pre-activated anyway, so it's been a non-issue for us so far. Either
way, 3 votes for the NIC and one for the CPU S# could likely push
actviation status over the edge since that leaves only 6 unchanged
votes and the limit is supposed to be 7.
From
http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.htm:
The WPA system checks ten categories of hardware:
1. Display Adapter
2. SCSI Adapter
3. IDE Adapter (effectively the motherboard)
4. Network Adapter (NIC) and its MAC Address
5. RAM Amount Range (i.e., 0-64mb, 64-128mb, etc.)
6. Processor Type
7. Processor Serial Number
8. Hard Drive Device
9. Hard Drive Volume Serial Number (VSN)
10. CD-ROM / CD-RW / DVD-ROM
What about formatting a hard disk?
Two things are recorded for disks: the number of the disk drive itself,
and the Volume Serial Number (VSN) of the partition on it.
HINT No. 1: The VSN is part of the data in the partition's first sector,
so it is changed when you reformat the drive. It is worth getting the
freeware utility Volume ID to restore the original VSN. Before you
reformat, run VOL from a Command Prompt, note the VSN (e.g., 1F2E-3C4B)
in the second line. Then, after the reformat and new Windows XP
installation, defer the new activation until you have run Volume ID to
restore the old VSN, and rebooted. This is not essential - but it saves
one of the 'Yes votes' against any future hardware change. (If you don't
wish to run this utility, the next best way to obtain the same result
would be to delete the old Win XP files from the hard drive before
reinstalling, rather than actually reformatting.)
HINT No. 2: Another thing that changes the VSN is converting a FAT 32
partition to NTFS. So, if you upgrade a system using FAT 32 to Windows
XP and intend to convert to NTFS, do the conversion before activating
the system. Remember, you can wait a while: you have 30 days before you
need to activate. The machine's hardware at the time of the first
activation is what counts. Or, if you have already activated, use Volume
ID as described in Hint No. 1. If you are doing this after activation,
also first back up the WPA.DBL and WPA.BAK files, as described in Hint
No. 3 below, and, after completion of the conversion, restore these
files and reboot again.
HINT No. 3: It is valuable to back up the two files WPA.DBL and WPA.BAK
from the Windows\System32 folder.Then, should they get damaged, or
should you do a 'Repair' reinstallation of Win XP, these files can be
copied back to restore the prior activation status. However, this only
works in those limited circumstances. The contents of these two files is
matched to the specific Windows setup; therefore, contrary to what many
journalists and members of the user community have written in recent
months, restoring these files will not restore your activation status
following a reformat and clean install.
The disk drive and partition recorded will be the ones that the system
has found first when doing the initial activation: normally the one from
which the system booted. So, if you change that disk and reinstall
Windows to a new partition, you have lost two of the Yes votes. If,
though, you add a new hard disk, copy the original partition onto it
with an imaging program, and retain the original hard drive as a
secondary data disk, it will still be found by a later check. This is
because it searches for all disks, and the vote will be Yes in both
categories if it finds the original one, with the partition not
reformatted.
--
Peace!
Kurt
Self-anointed Moderator
microscum.pubic.windowsexp.gonorrhea
http://microscum.com/mscommunity
"Trustworthy Computing" is only another example of an Oxymoron!
"Produkt-Aktivierung macht frei"
