I've got a Packard Bell desktop with Vista Basic installed. I wanted to upgrade to Ultimate so I followed these steps: *Using OEMdump I extracted the cert *I saved the original Vista key via Bean keyfinder (just in case) *Checked with everest if bios has slic (OEM ID=PacBel, OEM Table ID=PBDT000E) All seems ok. *Popped in a Vista disc and upgraded to Ultimate without entering a key. *After the install I copied the cert to c:\ *I registered the cert via the command line - no problem *I've read that the key for Vista is independent of the cert and bios. Via the command line I entered a Ultimate serial. I get the message that the key is successfully installed. Vista isn't activated however. I tried 5 different Ultimate keys to no avail. What have I overlooked? I have 30 days to come up with a solution ;-)
Install and open ACPI Scope. Go to File-->Load AACPI Information-->From BIOS Save it as *.ats file and upload please.
Thanks for all the answers thus far. Unfortunately I will be out of the country for a week so I won't be able to test your suggestions till next week. This is what I'll do once I get back: *Use the Packard Bell recovery disc. This will reinstall the activated Vista Basic onto the machine. (plus all the **** that comes with it ) *I'll make a copy of the tokens.dat / cert. and upload it. *I'll install Vista Ultimate from scratch (clean install), wiping all previous traces of Vista Basic *I'll try to activate Vista Ultimate. Whatever the outcome is, I'll post the results here.
You can also have closer look to SOURCES\$OEM$\$$\SYSTEM32\OEM. Make sure you can see hidden and system folders. Maybe you can get the cert. right from your recovery DVD.
Yen, you totally did it! Vista is activated!! I couldn't be happier! So, if I understand this correctly the token.dat file was in this case a 'container' for multiple license files. The oemdump utility assumes a token.dat only holds 1 cert and therefor extracted the first one. The token.dat in my case had more than 1 cert. This means Packard Bell is using at least 2 different SLICs and 2 matching certs, right? Thanks again for your assistance.
I'll reupload them when I'm back at home again. We've got now a new cert. with SLIC! At tokens.dat I've found a lot of sections with the typical start and end of a cert. Most of them have got a different size, so I decided to search at the end of tokens.dat......
Juts to let people know, this worked for me also after ages trying to get Ultimate activated on a PBell iMedia. (worked with the cert Yen extracted from the weird tokens.dat) Thanks to Yen and Enigma!