I have a dual-boot system and what I am trying to accomplish is activation of Both Vista x86 on one partition and Win7 x64 on another hard drive. I modified my bios with the Dell SLIC v2.1 (Dell.bin + Dell.xrm-ms) Windows 7 x64 activates fine, but Vista .x86 on the other drive will not. I've tried 3 Pkeys with the Dell.xrm-ms license, when I go to run 'slmgr -ato', it returns -'Error: Product not found'. I've tried 'slmgr -rilc c:\Dell.xrm-ms' also. (I've also done this with the Lenovo & HP slics v2.1, thinking something in the certificates were wonky. They work the same way, Win7=validated Vista=no.) Vista validates fine using an emulator, which uses an SLIC v2.0, so it of course invalidates the Windows 7 activation until I remove it. I'm thinking this bios flashing should work to activate both as all I would need to do then is run 'slmgr' in both environments with the Dell or other certificate and keys for Vista x86 and Win7 x64, respectively. So what am I missing? It's been said this should work, all I have left in my brain to troubleshoot with is that somehow I don't have the right combination of slic2.1, cert, and pkey, but I really don't think so. Am I thinking correctly? I've rebooted as often as I thought it might matter. Man, I just can't figure it no good. Thanks very much in advance for any help.
Check RSDT and XSDT tables in your BIOS with Everest or RW-everything. I mean OEMID and OEMTableID. Windows 7 needs to match them in SLIC and XSDT only, Vista - also in RSDT.
In Everest: RSDT says Dell & QA09, XSDT says (emulated)- Dell & QA09 In RW-everything: RSDT says Dell & QA09, XSDT isn't there Is this as it should be? Thanks for taking the trouble to reply to my post.
Update So I did an in-place upgrade of the Vista 32-bit installation to a Windows 7 32-bit installation and now both the 64 and 32 bit installations are activated fine. Contrary to what I've read in these threads, Vista would ONLY activate with SLIC v2.0 with Asus.xrm-ms, not with HP or Dell or Lenovo SLIC v2.1 and their corresponding certificates. I saw no point in waiting for an Asus SLIC v2.1, unless I was going to keep Vista.