A hard drive change does not affect your bios. Since your machine came with win7 oem preactivated, your bios already has SLIC 2.1. You can use your Gateway recovery disk to reinstall windows as often as you like and your system will be offline activated each time. Theres no need to call MS.
Yup. SLIC 2.1 is part of the bios. It's orginal straight from Gateway, unaltered. Beyond that, I installed 7 HP with the VQB3X- SLP that came originally installed. After that I installed the cert labeled Gateway from the Repository. So: SLIC + Key + Cert +reboot = 26 days left to activate.
Did you install the cert and the key in elevated cmd? Also did you get the installed successfully message?
Install using you gateway recovery disk then use slic dump toolkit to grab your key and certificate it will be partial key but you can compair it to ones posted on stickies once you have those backed up, then do your clean install from RTM dvd.
Lets try some logic. A Win7 OEM:SLP activation consists of 3 elements. These elements are: 1) SLIC 2.1 in the BIOS 2) A Certificate that matches the SLIC in the BIOS 3) Any SLP Key belonging to the installed Edition Now since the SLP Key can be from any manufacturer, and you do have a valid SLIC 2.1 in the BIOS, the culprit (if it wasnt a user-error) can only be the Certificate. Ergo: Find a Gateway Certificate that matches the SLIC in your BIOS and your problem should be solved.