However, because I have a lot of 'branded' machines, I tend to use the OEM SLP activation (SLP = System Locked Preinstall) as it uses a special product key & certificate file which it then matches against the BIOS which results in Windows activating, during install, offline .... and hence, not involving M$ crappy activation servers.
Yep, which works great, until you want to P2V one of these into your DataCenter VM cluster.. ;-)
desiv
(I know you said not for work, but I've had that happen..)
I know exactly what you mean, but havn't done that myself, as I reserve all my MAPS licences for work machines and OEM:SLP licences for home stuff.
Saying all this, I've started moving some of my home machines to 'alternatives' such as Ubuntu Linux. For home, I don't really need anything specific other than Internet (inc. Flash and Java suppot) and the ability to play MP3s (and possibly the odd DivX movie) - Ubuntu does all this for me, and being quite technical, I have no problems working it.
I have to admit, since the days of XP and onwards, I've slowly been moving my interest away from Windows as a home user due to the ludicrus changes to the OS and the abismal activation system.
The one thing I can do with Linux, is that under most circumstances, I can change the hardware completely (inc. Motherboard) and the OS will work no matter what machine it's on, which is more than can be said M$'s efforts. I do that with Windows and at best I'll have to reactivate with a new key, but more often that not, doing this will be met with a BSOD claiming 'INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE'
due to the difference in HDD controller or different CPU platform .... this is mainly down to the fact that the machines I change motherboard on, I'm upgrading (so no like-for-like swaps) and hence could be moving from a Pentium 4 to a Intel Core i5 or something, hence the massive difference in hardware. Admitidly, Linux isn't perfect, and by upgrading like this I tend to find I have packages installed that are optimized for older hardware, but that's not a massive issue as it can be resolved as the OS actually boots
---------- Post added at 07:36 ---------- Previous post was at 07:31 ----------
did you try fixboot or fixmbr? "after booting to recovery console from the cd"
they are both are prety good for boot sector repairs. fixboot would have quite possibly done the trick as it rewries the boot sector "you can even specify which disk".
i tend not to format if possible.
I tend not to reformat if I can help it.
For me (especially in my 'work' life), it's a massive inconvience to me & the customer if I reformat & reinstall the OS.
The best boot sector repair I've found to Windows, is actually in the 'BOOT' folder of a Windows 7 CD called 'bootsect.exe'
Although it's designed for Windows 7, it can run under Windows XP and later. I created a custom Windows PE CD (Windows PE = Windows Pre-Install Environment) with the tool on.
It's used like this:
to repair Windows 2000/XP/2003 boot sector & MBR
bootsect /nt52 C: /force /mbr
(replace C: with the drive Windows is installed on, /force will force a dismount and /mbr also repairs the MBR as well as the bootsector)
and to repair Windows Vista/7/2008/2008-R2
bootsect /nt60 C: /force /mb
However, please note that it only repairs the MBR and the boot sector. It DOES NOT repair your boot.ini file. To do that, you need XP recovery console.
If the problem is that bad, and the hard drive is OK (and it's XP of course), I will go down the 'in-place upgrade' root. This is an often overlooked process that is a cure for most XP boot issues, but sometimes not all the registry gets inherited (although most of it does)
To do this, boot your XP cd, when you get to the installation options, press ENTER to do a full install, press F8 to accept the licence agreement. Then, the installer will search for existing Windows installs .... it'll find you existing XP install and prompt you if you want to repair/upgrade this installation. Accept that, sit back, and enjoy the ride. It'll remove some system files and replace them with the ones from the XP CD. Admitidly, you'll end up with an XP install that'll need shed loads of updates doing to it, but you keep all the existing user accounts etc.
This trick also works with Windows NT4.0, Windows 2000 and with Windows Server 2003 however, DO NOT do this on a Windows PC that's a member of the domain (unless you're happy to have to reinstall stuff and re-join it to the domain) as doing a repair install this way will regenerate the machine SID (and therefore break domain membership)
