I just got a win7 netbook that is pretty beat up, but the hardware seems very good. The first thing I found was that the Home Premium install was cracked. I wanted it to be legal, so I cloned over a Win7 Starter factory restore partition from the same netbook model (Acer Nav50) and ran it on the machine. Everything installed fine, but I was surprised to find that the install was not activated. When I tried to activate, it said the key I had entered (I hadn't entered one) was invalid. That surprised me. I thought the restore partition, being of the same manufacturer, not to mention the same model, would be self-activating. The COA is off this unit, so this was a brick wall for me. Surprise #2: I then used the COA from another unit of the same make/model. I intended to move the hardware into its case anyway, because it's in much better shape. So I figured this was basically a motherboard replacement and I would have to phone in the activation request. But to my surprise, the new COA worked straightaway! This is beyond me. Why didn't the factory restore partition self-activate, and why did another unit's COA work on this one? The other COA has been out of service a good year or so. Thanks.
Thanks, urie. Your help is appreciated! Do I understand that tutorial correctly, that the W7 factory restore partition from one machine will not work in another machine because of an individualized certificate? I ran the SLIC Toolkit on the netbook. Under the Advanced tab it said that SLIC 2.0 is installed. But there are a number of red errors. The Marker is Invalidated. and there is No OEM certificate found. I'm running the Toolkit as administrator. And yet the installation still validates online!