Hello, I seem to have a problem activating W7 on Samsung X420 laptop. Originally it came with an English version of W7 Ultimate. I have made a Ghost image as a fail safe, re-formated the HDD and installed an Italian OEM version. Now Iam unable to activate. I have extracted the original certificate from the English installation and used the OEM SLP from the internet. No joy. I have then tried to use the certificate available on the Internet, but that didn't work either. Basically, everything seems OK. The BIOS SLIC checks out as 2.1, the certificate installs OK and the SLP also. Why the activation doesn't work is beyond me. I have also tried to reinstall the cert using SLMGR.VBS -rilc, but that didn't help either. I know I could just add the Italian locale to the US version, but that would mean avoiding this problem, not solving it. And I want a clean installation with no trial rubbish on it anyway. Any ideas what could be wrong or what else could I try?
@urie WAT (KB971033) is not and was not installed on the system. @WinFLP I will investigate, but I believe the Italian version was downloaded from MSDN. I know I can use EN Ultimate and install any language on top of it but I really need the Italian DVD to work. The installer and the system have to be natively Italian out of the box. I am still hopefull that timesurfer has a solution.
WAT is still not installed according to the report. Only if you install it, WAT will be able to diagnose why the activation is failing.
oops! Sorry. What I posted in my last post were reports from a clean installation without WAT and activated using Windows 7 Loader. I will reproduce the "buggy" conditions for you and send you the reports. It may take a couple of days, though. I sure want to know why the SLMGR way didn't work.
OK...now I will just make myself look stupid, but I cannot reproduce the problem. I have used a clean Italian installation, I ran my shell script to activate it and it worked. Done this a hundred times and used the same script. I've no idea why it didn't work in the past few days. I haven't changed anything although logic would tell me I have. Thank you all for help. Consider this thread closed.