Firstly, thanks to all the guys developing loaders and activation cracks - I appreciate all your work Secondly, I'm using a mid 2009 macbook pro with win7. Back when I installed it, I didn't know anything about loaders, and for the life of me I can't remember if the win7 I have installed had the loader built in, or if I had to do it myself (I've done loads of installs since and used Daz's loader, but as this was my first, and my main machine, I can't remember what I did!). My questions are... 1, How can I find out what loader I currently have? If it helps, I get a cursor in the top left of the screen for about 20 seconds before the 'starting windows' screen. 2, If I 'unload' the loader and windows isn't activated any more, will I be able to boot at all or will it just say that my grace period has expired and not give me the chance to use a new loader? I've got everything on this laptop (music, family photos etc..) so I don't want to kill it, although I have got a ghost backup. 3, If I run Daz's loader (1.7.7r), the status field says 'Activated (Untouched)' - what does this actually mean? I'm leaning towards the fact that I am using this loader. How can I tell if I have a software mod, or BIOS mod installed? Right now I'm a bit concerned with the WAT update looming. Daz's loader says that I'm using a Dell bios (which obviously won't tie up with the motherboard manufacturer), and there aren't Apple SLIC, Certificates, and Serials available. Sorry for the bunch of random newbie questions, but I've been reading loads of threads on these forums to try to get to the bottom of it myself, and whilst I do consider myself to be an IT professional, I can't find answers to my questions Cheers in advance!
99% change you have a loader. look to see if you have a grldr file on any of your partitions. Install the latest Daz loader. If nothing else it will speed up your boot time (it's reported as speeding up Mac boots). A bigger concern is if you have a fairly early loader, you probably have the blacklisted lenovo key. Installing the latest Daz loader will insert a non-blacklisted key. Why do people think their computer will be rendered unusable if it's not activated or determined non-genuine? Microsoft has said time and time again, the computer will boot, all programs will function, you will just enter "notification mode". Background will turn black, and you will get a nag screen at boot. Otherwise the system will continue to function. Try it, open an administrator command prompt: Code: slmgr /upk to uninstall the product key which will render it "non-genuine". You can take a normal Retail disc, install it, not put in a product key, and continue to use it indefinitely without doing anything. Also, the update is OPTIONAL you don't have to install it.
That last bit needs to be stickied. Seeing a frenzy about this on a multitude of forums. It's just like WGA from XP.. hide that particular update, and you'll never hear from it again, problem solved. Credit to Microsoft though for making the "oops" mode a lot less severe than it used to be. Just wish Microsoft would stop flagging these as critical, as some people think that they must install it or their system will blow up.
And some people think once you install WATu, it MUST check every 90 days or the machine will blow up. When really it will TRY again in 90 days, no net connection it will try again later, it won't make the machine blow up. That would just be begging for false positives which MS knows wouldn't do them any good. WGA didn't make it in Windows XP SP3, but people assume this will be part of Windows7 SP1.
Thanks for the info! I do understand that the update won't be mandatory, and I'm not one of the people panicking about it I was more worried about uninstalling a loader (which would mean my activation period passed months ago) and what would happen. If I don't know 100% what loader I'm using, what is the procedure for using a new one? Do I just install over the top, or do I need to remove the old one? I had a look at my product key (using everest), and it's the dell one - when I load Daz's loader and click advanced, it shows the SLIC, Certificate, and Serial as Dell (although I don't know if that's what it will show by default, or if it's detected what I have installed). Thanks again!
To know, if you have any loader installed, just run vista7 slic ldr. If Loader info under slic info says in Green 'GRLDR' or like 'ABCDe' something like that, you know its bootloader installed. If it says 'No Loader' or 'BIOS Mod', you know what it means.