Hi, Just looking for some help. For a friend, and(potentially) for myself. My mate recently had some HDD problems on his acer laptop, and I had to reformat it to fix it. He hadn't burned the recovery discs and acer don't provide a vista oem disc with the laptop. I also have a vista acer laptop, which I have repartitioned to dual boot XP and Vista. When this happens vista's eRecovery management won't make the recovery discs(WTF I only resized C: and D: but I did not touch the recovery partition or the acer arcade partition why should my C: and D: being different sizes make any difference its all a ploy). I decided to email acer and try to get 2 sets of recovery disks, £50 each. I find this a bit outrageous, for something I should have been given when I bought the damn thing. When I dual booted vista and xp acer's boot loader is replaced with vista's, and neither ALt+F10, nor F10 seems to work to boot to the recovery partition so no help there then. Anyway I obtained a generic Vista OEM disc using other means and used my mates genuine key, off the sticker on the bottom of his laptop to activate. It recognised the key as a genuine vista basic key. And installed vista basic. However the OS now says it needs to be activated. I tried online, and it won't do it. Buggery! First off, if I phone MS will they give me a new activation (the same way they would if you changed a HDD and some RAM at the same time and it required a new activation). Secondly if this fails, would it be possible for me to rip a recovery disc off the recovery partition? I'd like to do it legal, but the companies force me into a corner. I can't afford a £50 for a recovery disc that may not even recover a complete broken HDD/replacement and neither can my mate (and we don't have the same version of vista so the same disc won't do) Thanks for any help A.
thanks urie, will our genuine keys off our laptops work okay with these certs? thanks, you are a life saver! And a money saver lol.
@ oRb, i think you are wrong here i think mental2k machines are OEM SLP or OEMACT and the reason it didn't activate is because he hasn't used an ACER.XRM-MS certificate it is very rare now to get branded machines especially laptops that are COA.
Correct...The main reason for the COA on the bottom of the laptop is not for activation, it is to show a legitimate license for the OS. Legal stuff. The OS is still activated off of the SLP or SLIC, depending on the OS. If you needed to replace the HD, you have a recourse for reactivation, but more often than not, M$ will refer to the OEM for a replacement DVD with the cert/PID included per Urie's link...
@ oRb, no need to try and explain to me sorry i have been at this game for a good few years now and if you really read over on Keznews you will see i have posted quite a few things about windows activation and especially OEM, anyways but we are talking about acer machines not the small guy on the corner shop who buy's in OEM licences. i,e 3 at a time i know i worked in such shops. enough said we will find out when mental2k eventually replies